Being and Place among the Tlingit 9780295800400, 9780295987491

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C U LT U R E , P L A C E , A N D N AT U R E

studies in anthropology and environment K. Sivaramakrishnan, Series Editor

C U LT U R E , P L A C E , A N D N AT U R E Centered in anthropology, the Culture, Place, and Nature series encompasses new interdisciplinary social science research on environmental issues, focusing on the intersection of culture, ecology, and politics in global, national, and local contexts. Contributors to the series view environmental knowledge and issues from the multiple and often conflicting perspectives of various cultural systems. The Kuhls of Kangra: Community-Managed Irrigation in the Western Himalaya by Mark Baker The Earth’s Blanket: Traditional Teachings for Sustainable Living by Nancy Turner Property and Politics in Sabah, Malaysia: Native Struggles over Land Rights by Amity A. Doolittle Border Landscapes: The Politics of Akha Land Use in China and Thailand by Janet C. Sturgeon From Enslavement to Environmentalism: Politics on a Southern African Frontier by David McDermott Hughes Ecological Nationalisms: Nature, Livelihood, and Identities in South Asia, edited by Gunnel Cederlöf and K. Sivaramakrishnan Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–1856 by David Arnold Being and Place among the Tlingit by Thomas F. Thornton Forest Guardians, Forest Destroyers: The Politics of Environmental Knowledge in Northern Thailand by Tim Forsyth & Andrew Walker

BEING AND PLACE among the TLINGIT

Thomas F. Thornton

university of washington press seattle and london in association with

sealaska heritage institute juneau

© 2008 by the University of Washington Press Printed in the United States of America Design by Pamela Canell 12 11 10 09

5432

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. University of Washington Press P.O. Box 50096, Seattle, WA 98145 U.S.A. www.washington.edu/uwpress Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thornton, Thomas F. Being and place among the Tlingit / Thomas F. Thornton. p.

cm.—(Culture, place, and nature)

Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-295-98749-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-295-98749-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Tlingit Indians—Social life and customs. Geographical—Social aspects—Alaska. Alaska

2. Names,

3. Cultural property—

4. Geographical perception—Alaska.

life and customs. e99.t6t55

2007

5. Alaska—Social

I. Sealaska Heritage Institute. 305.897'270798—dc22

II. Title.

2007023887

The paper used in this publication is acid-free and 90 percent recycled from at least 50 percent post-consumer waste. It meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.A8

contents

Tlingit Spelling and Pronunciation Guide viii Preface xi

1

introduction

Place and Tlingit Senses of Being 3 2

know your place

The Social Organization of Geographic Knowledge 36 3

what’s in a name?

Place and Cognition 68 4

production and place

“It was easy for me to put up fish there.” 116 5

ritual as emplacement

The Potlatch / Ku.éex’ 173 6

conclusion

Toward an Anthropology of Place 189

Appendix: Tlingit Resources with Seasonality 199 Notes 211 Bibliography 217 Index 237

illustrations

map 1.1

Lingít Aaní, Tlingit Country 2

map 2.1

Selected sites in Herman Kitka Sr.’s place-name inventory 63

map 3.1

Story map of Aak’wtaatseen “Salmon Boy” myth 75

fig. 2.1

Austin Hammond and the Sockeye Point Robe (X’aakw X’aayí Naaxein) 61

fig. 3.1

Kéex’ Luwoolk’í 100

fig. 3.2

Chookaneidí Glacier Bay Button Blanket 108

fig. 4.1

Time spent (%) resource gathering, Klukwan, 1931 122

fig. 4.2

The late Mary Willis holds the Deisheetaan button blanket of Sitkoh Bay history 142

fig. 4.3

Mount Saint Elias 144

fig. 5.1

A rock in the river 175

fig. 5.2

K’eik’w X’óow (Black-Legged Kittiwake Blanket) 181

fig. 6.1

Herman Kitka Sr. drying salmon at his smokehouse in Deep Bay, 1994 194

table 2.1

Tlingit Sociopolitical Organization (1750–1912) 43

table 2.2

Major Kwáans in Tlingit Territory, from North to South 45

table 2.3

Some Tlingit Clans Named for Places and Their Distribution 48–51

table 2.4

Tlingit Social Organization, with a Profile of Herman Kitka Sr. 62

table 3.1

Common Relational Nouns Found in Tlingit Place-Names 84

table 3.2

Common Geographical Generics in Tlingit Place-Names 85

table 3.3

Semantic Referents in Place-Names 87

table 3.4

What Is Named 89

table 3.5

Semantic Frequency of Selected Subsistence Resources 95

table 4.1

Island and Mainland Calendars (Moons) among the Northern Tlingit 121

table 4.2

Contemporary Subsistence Production and Native Community Integrity 164

tlingit spelling and pronunciation guide The spelling of Tlingit words conforms to the accepted popular orthography first developed by Constance M. Naish and Gillian L. Story and revised by Jeff Leer and Nora Marks Florendo Dauenhauer in 1972 (see Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer 1987:38–46). Important Tlingit concepts and names for places are italicized within the text. Personal and social group names, however, are not. Coastal Tlingit has four long vowels and four short vowels, represented and pronounced as follows: Tlingit vowel A Aa E Ei I Ee U Oo

As in the English Was Saab (a Swedish automobile) Ten Vein Hit Seek Push Moon

Tlingit example tás (thread) taan (sea lion) té (stone) yeis (horse clams) hít (house) s’eek (black bear) núkt (male grouse) xóots (brown bear)

Vowels may be pronounced with either a high (á) or a low (à) tone. In northern Tlingit the low tone is unmarked. In southern Tlingit both tones are marked. Consonants in Tlingit include more than two dozen sounds not found in English. The technical sound chart below (see Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer 1987; Leer 1991) provides a basic guide to the spelling and pronunciation of consonants in Tlingit words.

viii

Tlingit Consonantal Sound Chart

Alveolar Stop plain aspirated

glottalized Affricative plain aspirated

glottalized Fricative plain

glottalized Nasal Glide

Lateral

Palatal

d t t’

Velar Plain Round

Uvular Plain Round

Glottal Plain Round

g gw k kw k’ k’w

g gw k kw k’ k’w

.

.w

x xw x’ x’w

h

hw

dz ts ts’

dl tl tl’

j ch ch’

s s’

l l’

sh

x xw x’ x’w

y

w

n

Tlingit Pronunciation Guide ix

preface

I first became interested in researching Tlingit concepts of place during the summer of 1989, when, as a young graduate student, I was employed by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Division of Subsistence, to study the historical and contemporary use of a famous but dwindling red salmon fishery in northern Southeast Alaska, known as Sitkoh Bay. Sitkoh Bay lay on the border between Sitka and Angoon, two Tlingit communities with historical ties to the place and stakes in its management. Upon my first visit to Angoon, I was directed to see Matthew Fred Sr. and Mary Willis, elders of the Deisheetaan clan, which was said to have “owned” and “taken care of” that bay. Approaching the leaders of the right social group was extremely important; indeed, as I was to learn, the social and physical geography are inseparable in Tlingit concepts of place. This was my first lesson. I shall not soon forget the first thing Matthew Fred Sr. said to me, for it was perhaps the singular lesson not only about Sitkoh Bay but about Tlingit geography as a whole: “You have to understand. There’s a history about that place. We’ve got stories on it.” My first encounter with Mary Willis was similarly poignant. I knocked on her door and, after introducing myself, nervously stated my desire to learn something about the sockeye salmon fishery at Sitkoh Bay. She simply nodded and, leaving the door open, turned and walked back toward the kitchen table and began to narrate: “I’ve been worried about it. I don’t like what’s happening to that place. . . . My uncle used to take care of it.” Mary Willis had Sitkoh Bay on her mind. And the rest was history—literally. For this reason, history and social groupings have remained central to my inquiry into Tlingits’ senses of place. After returning to Alaska the following summer for a short stint of fieldwork, I joined the Division of Subsistence as a resource specialist. xi

I was fortunate in that this work took me to communities throughout Southeast Alaska and enabled me to become familiar with the people and geography of the Southeast region from Yakutat to Saxman. Although most of the projects I was involved in concerned fish and wildlife harvest patterns, this research led quite naturally into discussions of place. Tlingits tend to hunt and fish in areas that they know and to which they have social ties. In addition to housing desirable natural resources, these places have other cultural values, which people invoke in myriad ways. Through this work, I learned another valuable lesson: hunting and fishing in particular and production in general are fertile contexts for learning, thinking, and speaking about places. Conversely, just as subsistence is central to place-making, so too is place central to Alaska Native subsistence lifeways, although federal and state subsistence laws protect only “customary and traditional uses” of resources, not places. My knowledge of the multifaceted relationships among Tlingit subsistence, history, social organization, and landscape was further developed when I became involved, along with the Division of Subsistence, the Hoonah Indian Association, and the National Park Service, in a formal attempt to map Tlingit place-names in the vicinity of Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve. This map spawned tremendous interest in the Tlingit names placed on the land and what they mean and helped the Huna Tlingits and the Park Service move their relationship from one of contention over resource rights to one of increasing collaboration (see hia 2006). In the course of this work, and in my own studies, I continued to record and analyze Tlingit place-names with support from numerous institutions, organizations, and individuals to whom I am exceptionally grateful. My fieldwork in Angoon, Sitka, and Yakutat was supported from grants from the Jacobs Fund of the Whatcom Museum and the Phillips Fund of the American Philosophical Society. Additional research on place-names was funded through three generous grants by the Language and Heritage grant program of the National Park Service through the Southeast Native Subsistence Commission under the leadership of Harold Martin and Gordon Jackson; the results of this region-wide survey are being published separately through the Sealaska Heritage Institute and the University of Washington Press. I also benefited from a xii Preface

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1997 and received support on a range of place-related projects from the following: University of Alaska Southeast, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Park Service, Sealaska Corporation, Sealaska Heritage Foundation (now Institute), Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, Sitka Tribe of Alaska, Hoonah Indian Association, Auk Kwáan Tribe, Angoon Community Association, Chilkat Indian Village, Chilkoot Indian Association, Skagway Traditional Council, Yakutat Tlingit Tribe, Carcross-Tagish First Nation, Ketchikan Indian Association, Douglas Island Indian Association, Juneau Tlingit and Haida Community Council, Pelican Tlingit and Haida Community Council, Tenakee Springs Indian Community Association, Native Village of Saxman, Organized Village of Kake, Organized Village of Kasaan, Hydaburg Cooperative Association, Klawock Cooperative Association, Craig Community Association, Petersburg Indian Association, Wrangell Cooperative Association, Alaska Rural Systemic Initiative, Alaska Native Language Center, Portland State University, Saint Lawrence University, and Trinity College. An earlier version of chapter 2 was published in Ethnology (Fall 1997) by the University of Pittsburgh and appears herein with permission in revised form. Parts of the central arguments in chapters 3, 4, and 5, also reprinted with permission, appeared in summary form in an essay titled “The Geography of Tlingit Character,” in Coming to Shore (2004), edited by Marie Mauzé, Michael Harkin, and Sergei Kan and published by the University of Nebraska Press in Lincoln. In analyzing names I was fortunate to have some formal linguistic training from the late Richard Newton and Dr. Walter Soboleff and plenty of assistance with “unpacking” names from linguists Jeff Leer and Nora and Richard Dauenhauer, and a host of Tlingit speakers, most especially, Herman Kitka Sr. and John Marks. In 1993 this project took an exceptionally enriching and embracing turn when Herman Kitka Sr. agreed to work with me on compiling a personal geography—a survey of his knowledge of named places and their associations. He proved to be my greatest teacher, friend, and brother. Through his extraordinary intellect, memory, patience, humor, and wisdom he taught and continues to teach me what Tlingit places mean and how they fit into the order of things. When I asked for a lesPreface xiii

son in Tlingit geography, he taught me a course, which continues. His geographic life history proved so rich that I became interested in it as a text itself. I compiled and analyzed a preliminary version of that text as part of my 1995 dissertation, but since then this project has continued to grow considerably and will culminate in a separate publication. In recognition of his status as teacher, Herman Kitka Sr. was invited to participate in my thesis defense at the University of Washington in Seattle. In the spring of 1996 we taught a course together at the University of Alaska Southeast, providing further opportunity for collaboration and understanding of the ways Tlingits construct and relate to landscapes in Southeast Alaska. In a ceremony during that semester Herman bestowed upon me the ultimate gift: adoption into his family as his brother, giving me the name Yaan Jiyeet Gaax, carried by his late brother David and many distinguished Kaagwaantaan before him. For this exceptional embrace I am eternally grateful, humbled, and indebted. My thinking on place-names and senses of place has been greatly enhanced by Eugene Hunn, my mentor at the University of Washington, and by the exceptional work of a wide range of scholars and artists inside and outside of anthropology, especially David Abram, Keith Basso, William Bright, Robert Bringhurst, Julie Cruikshank, Nora and Richard Dauenhauer, Robert Davis, Susan Fair, Walter Goldschmidt, A. I. Hallowell, Michael Harkin, Dell Hymes, Stephen Jett, Leslie Main Johnson, Miriam Kahn, Sergei Kan, James Kari, Steve Langdon, Michael Krauss, Jeff Leer, Frederica de Laguna, Marie Mauzé, Dan Montieth, Fred Myers, Richard Nelson, Priscilla Schulte, Brian Thom, Anthony F. C. Wallace, Thomas Waterman, Gary Witherspoon, and others. I would also like to thank colleagues, associates, and former students at the University of Alaska, Saint Lawrence University, and Trinity College, especially Rosita Worl, Wallace Olson, Ginny Mulle, Clive Thomas, Judy Andree, Pat Fitzgerald, Robin Walz, John Pugh, Hans Chester, Yarrow Vaara, Deborah McBride, Mary Kapsner, Norio Matsumoto, Nikki Morris, Ali Pomponio, Richard Perry, John Collins, Eve Stoddard, Celia Nyamweru, Margaret Bass, David Katz, Saurabh Gupta, Fred Errington, Jane Nadel-Klein, Beth Notar, Hugh Ogden, and Jim Trostle. Finally, I thank the expert staff at the University of Washington Press, especially Lorri Hagman, Pam Canell, Marilyn Trueblood, and Jane Lichty. xiv Preface

Like all contemporary ethnographers of the Tlingit, I labor in the shadow of Frederica de Laguna, whose classic works have laid the foundation for nearly all subsequent work. It was her Boasian attention to ethnogeographic detail that first drew my attention to Tlingit places and place-names and to the role of the past and of the clan in shaping Tlingit conceptualizations of space and place. She also graciously furnished me with copies of her unpublished notes on Tlingit place-names. In Alaska I would like to extend a tlein gunalchéesh (a big thankyou) to all those people who taught me something of Tlingit places, especially Mary Willis, Amy Marvin, Richard Dalton, Jessie Dalton, Vesta Dominicks, Charlie Joseph, Oscar Frank, John Bremner, Cecelia Kunz, Paul James, Charles Johnson, Richard Sheakley, Kelly St. Clair, Wilbur “Jumbo” James, Mary Johnson, Gilbert Mills, Edith Bean, Kelly James, Richard Newton, Frank Gordon, George Jim, Matthew Fred, Martha Kitka, Esther Shea, and Mark Jacobs, who have all walked into the forest. In addition, I would like to thank Harold Martin, George Davis, Ruth Demmert, Clarence Jackson, Mike Jackson, Lydia George, Gabriel George, Jimmy George, Matthew Kookesh, Joe Hotch, Marsha Hotch, Tom Jimmie, Paul and Marilyn Wilson, Lance Twitchell, Wanda Culp, Mary and Paul Rudolph, Charles Jack, Ken Grant, Sam Hanlon, Pat Mills, Frank White, Lilly White, George Ramos, Elaine Abraham, Judy Ramos, Ray Sensemeir, Walter Johnson, John and Roby Littlefield, Ethel Makinen, Vida Davis, Nels Lawson, Dan Marino, Andy Hope, Fred and Margaret Hope, Richard Stokes, Walter Soboleff, and others too numerous to mention. For intellectual and logistical support, I am especially grateful to Nora and Richard Dauenhauer, Nancy Yaw Davis, Andy Hope, Bob Schroeder, Robi Craig, Martha Betts, Rob Bosworth, Herman Kitka Jr., Harvey Kitka, Mike Turek, Karl Gurcke, Wayne Howell, Theresa Thibault, Dick and Rosemarie Isett, Margo Waring, and Doug Mertz. Finally, in addition to my Tlingit brother Herman Kitka Sr., I thank the rest of my family for their invaluable assistance, herculean tolerance, and unwavering support, especially my wife, Tia, whose understanding and intelligence informs this project in so many ways, and our children, Mariah, Liam, and Roan. In me you hold a special place.

Preface xv

being and place among the tlingit

map 1.1 . Lingít Aaní, Tlingit Country. Historical and Contemporary Kwáan Territories; courtesy of Tlingit Readers, Inc.

1 introduction Place and Tlingit Senses of Being

These lands are vital not only to our subsistence, but also to our sense of being as Tlingit people. —gabriel george

In the summer of 1990, I attended a public hearing staged by the U.S. Forest Service in Angoon (Aangóon, Isthmus Town, in Tlingit), a predominately Tlingit village of some six hundred residents located on Admiralty Island in the center of the Tongass National Forest in Southeast Alaska. The “810 subsistence hearing,” referring to section 810 of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980 (P.L. 96-487), was designed to solicit public response to a proposed commercial timber harvest in nearby Kelp Bay and its potential impacts on subsistence fish and wildlife users. A number of Tlingits testified at the hearing, as did some non-Natives. Most Angoon residents opposed the proposed logging and in general were critical of Forest Service logging practices and resource management. Others spoke more broadly on the concept of subsistence, which extends to many dimensions beyond its legal definition, and on the meaning of Kelp Bay to Angoon residents. A simple statement by Gabriel George, a middle-aged fisherman, particularly struck me. He said, “These lands are vital not only to our subsistence, but also to our sense of being as Tlingit people.” He did not elaborate on what he meant by that statement or by the phrase “sense of being,” for it seemed self-evident to the mostly Tlingit audience (and painfully irrelevant to the professional planners assembled on behalf of the U.S. Forest Service). But the phrase has echoed in my mind ever since. In many ways this project is an ethnographic attempt to understand that statement. 3

the problem In a fundamental sense, the landscape is part of every individual’s sense of being, not just that of Tlingits, or Native Americans, or indigenous peoples. Historically—and even in the contemporary age of globalization and generic “non-places” (Auge 1995)—landscape and place have been central to culture in all societies, from the production and maintenance of cultural materials, knowledge, and values, to the formation of individual and group identity. Place can be said to constitute a cultural system (cf. Geertz 1973; Kruger 1996). As geographer Edward Relph (1976:43) puts it, “There is for virtually everyone a deep association with and consciousness of the places where we were born and grew up, where we live now, or where we have had particularly moving experiences. This association seems to constitute a vital source of both individual and cultural identity and security.” Archeologist Christopher Tilley (1994:15) echoes this sentiment: “Personal and cultural identity is bound up with place; a topoanalysis is one exploring the creation of self-identity through place. Geographical experience begins in places, reaches out to others through spaces, and creates landscapes or regions for human existence.” At the same time, one cannot deny the special relationships that indigenous peoples maintain with the landscapes they have inhabited for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Especially among indigenous hunting and gathering peoples, the importance of these relationships is exemplified in their basic metaphysics, which posits a cosmos that is alive, sentient, empowered, and moral. This animated, enchanted view of the universe as inhabited by a community of beings constantly in communication and exchange with human beings underlies processes of interanimation (Basso 1996) that define and enliven people in places and places in people. Thus, for Tlingits, and perhaps all indigenous peoples, place is not only a cultural system but the cultural system on which all key cultural structures are built. How, then, does one analyze and understand a people’s sense of being in a particular geographic environment? Clearly this enterprise involves a topoanalysis not only of the particular physical environment and people’s interactions with specific places but also of how individuals 4 Introduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being

and social groups define these places and express their being in relationship to them. As Arturo Escobar (2001:143) suggests, “From an anthropological perspective, it is important to highlight the emplacement of all cultural practices.” Studies of place represent old and venerable domains of inquiry in both the humanities and the social sciences, and recently they have undergone a renaissance. The philosopher Aristotle emphasized the remarkable, fundamental power of place and characterized it as “prior to all things,” an indispensable aspect of every substance, and a “vessel” or container that frames and holds things—perceptions, memories, feelings, and so on (cf. Casey 1993:13–16; 1997:ix–xi). Aristotle’s theory of the primordiality of place has been expanded by phenomenologists, such as Martin Heidegger (1962, 1977), Edward Casey (1993, 1997), and David Abram (1996), who have explored perceptual aspects of sensing place. Similarly, humanistic geographers (e.g., Tuan 1974, 1975, 1977; Relph 1976, 1987; Meining 1979; Buttimer and Seamon 1980; Pickles 1985; Agnew and Duncan 1989; Entrikin 1991; Sack 1997), noting the shortcomings of purely quantitative and positivist analyses of specific environments, have charted a more experientialist approach to the study of place. In sociology, this new interest in place prompted E. V. Walter (1988:215) to launch an ambitious new subfield called “topistics,” which he defines as “a holistic mode of inquiry designed to make the identity, character, and experience of place intelligible.” Similarly, psychologists have begun to formulate a “social psychology of place” based on factors contributing to place identity and place attachment (cf. Altman and Low 1992; Stedman 2002). And within anthropology are found attempts to formulate an anthropology of landscape (Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995; Bender and Winer 2001), space and place (Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003), and senses of place (Feld and Basso 1996). At the same time, postmodern studies across the disciplines have underscored the importance of recognizing multiplicities of location and place in cultural analyses, the inextricable connections between space, power, and knowledge in human societies, and the enduring significance of localization and place-based struggles amid the flows and seemingly homogenizing processes of globalization (cf. Appadurai 1996; Rodman 1992; Gregory 1994; Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Low 2000; Escobar 2001). Introduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being 5

A basic assumption underlying all this work is that to understand places one must understand the people who inhabit them. The dialectic between physical and cultural landscapes was well laid out by the geographer Carl O. Sauer (1927), who rejected the environmental determinism of his day in favor of a cultural historical approach that recognized human transformations of the land over time. Thus, landscapes and places are human constructions and relational fields, not just geographic determinants. A corollary to this idea is the notion that relationships between individuals and places are unique, complex, and dialectical. People affect places, and places affect people in countless ways. While it is still constructive to generalize about “a culture’s” views of space and place, it is also true that individuals within cultures do not view or relate to the landscape in exactly the same ways. For example, if one were to map the land-use biographies of individuals within the same culture, even within the same village or household, as Hugh Brody (1981) did with Beaver Indians of northeast British Columbia, one would find that no two map biographies are alike. This is because the configuration of every individual’s place experiences is unique. Similarly, as Margaret Rodman (1992:643) suggests, “places, like voices, are local and multiple” such that “for each inhabitant, a place has a unique reality, one in which meaning is shared with other people and places.” Thus, to speak about a Tlingit’s sense of being in relation to place is not to suggest a monolithic image tied to a single geographic landscape. On the contrary, as shall be shown, Tlingits relate to places through a variety of cultural processes that mediate activity and shape meaning. The means by which relationships with place are forged, maintained, and broken are the focus of this study. If places are largely human constructions, then it should follow that, in order to understand people, one must know something of their places. Unfortunately, however, anthropologists have not always been as attentive to this side of the equation. As Rodman (1992:640) points out, “anthropologists, who take pains to lead students through the minefields of conceptualizing culture often assume that place is unproblematic,” not a determinant but a given, simply the setting or location “where people do things.”1 But to decouple culture from place is to ignore the rich roles that place and landscape play in cultural systems. As I sus-

6 Introduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being

pect is true in all indigenous cultures, when certain elements of social life among the Tlingit—their names, stories, songs, and art—become abstracted or otherwise wrenched from their geographic moorings, they lose a vital part of their meaning and wholeness. Much of what I have witnessed among Tlingits in Southeast Alaska and elsewhere involves just the opposite process, namely, one of binding and rebinding themselves and their culture to specific places and landscapes. This book, then, is also an attempt to understand the anchoring role of place in Tlingit identity and being. Relationships with place are a matter not just of living and evolving in specific environments but also of imagining them. Humans not only study the land in order to make a living but also theorize about their ontological relationships to it. These musings and bits of empirical knowledge about the landscape accumulate over generations and become part of oral traditions, traditions that make people and place inseparable. As writer Barry Lopez points out (1986:244–45), “Even what is unusual does not become lost and therefore irrelevant. . . . The perceptions of any people wash over the land like a flood, leaving ideas hung up in the brush, like pieces of damp paper to be collected and deciphered.” If, as a newcomer, one views the landscape as a “wilderness” to be learned and experienced only directly and anew, then one misses these bits and pieces of place knowledge and thought that have evolved and become sedimented in indigenous cultures. However, if one only studies maps or photos, or reads narratives about the geography, culture, and folklore of a place, without experiencing it directly, then one is similarly lost. In this sense anthropology, with its emphasis on cultures and on “being there,” seems especially well suited to the study of place. Most of the popular literature on indigenous peoples’ conceptions of places has tended to contrast implicitly or explicitly “their” intimate, enchanted union with the landscape with “our” (Euro-American) mechanistic or estranged view. Obviously, such an approach is limited, if not flawed, and often yields a superficial or one-dimensional view of the complex and unique relations of peoples to the places they inhabit throughout the world. Here again, I believe an anthropological approach can help by providing conceptual tools and a framework for ethnographic studies of place.

Introduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being 7

cultural structures of emplacement As a general framework for an anthropological analysis of place making, I have identified four key cultural structures that are fundamental in mediating human relationships to place. These are (1) social organization, which groups and distributes people on the landscape and helps to coordinate their spatial world and interactions with place; (2) language and cognitive structures, which shape how places are perceived and conceptualized; (3) material production, particularly subsistence production, which informs how places are used, not used, or misused to sustain human life; and (4) ritual processes, which serve to symbolize, sanctify, condense, connect, transform, and transcend various dimensions of time, space, and place in ways that profoundly shape human place consciousness, identity, and experience. Each of these cultural structures is at once a response to the physical environment and a constitutive element of the human environment. As such, they are fundamental to understanding the relationship between people and places across cultures. As analytical frames for the study of place-making processes, the four cultural structures are especially useful for two reasons. First, they constitute discrete variables that can be examined independently over time. Second, and more significantly, they are the four most important means by which Tlingits themselves “reciprocally appropriate” the landscape, to borrow Scott Momaday’s (1974:80) felicitous phrase. It is through these media that Tlingits “invest themselves in the landscape” and, at the same time, “incorporate” the landscape into their “most fundamental experience” (80). How Tlingits use each of these structures to culturalize space and spatialize culture and to construct and maintain social, intellectual, material, and spiritual ties to places will be taken up in detail in subsequent chapters. Changes in language, material production, social organization, and ceremonial life have affected both the quantity and quality of Tlingit interactions with place, particularly in the postcontact era since 1800. Understanding these changes requires a diachronic and ethnohistoric perspective on place. In the case of language and cognition, these changes, particularly the displacement of the Tlingit language by English in public 8 Introduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being

and private discourse, have led to a loss of the rich and sensuous information content embedded in traditional linguistic domains, such as placenames. However, many of the cognitive and symbolic principles that inform the Tlingit views of place and the environment have been maintained and even enhanced despite competing worldviews and pressures to assimilate and develop. Continuity and changes in cognitive orientations toward place, while difficult to evaluate, are evident in expressive cultural forms—stories, songs, art, ritual, and the like—the mythopoetics through which Tlingits articulate their relationships to the land. For example, chapter 3 examines Huna Tlingits’ continuing ties to Glacier Bay as expressed through clan legends, names, and iconography. As the discussion shall show, these cultural forms represent the foundation of Huna clans’ identification with and sense of belonging to Glacier Bay, as well as their legal “title” to it. Changes in material production have been more varied. While fish and wildlife harvests remain an integral part of rural economies, other aspects of production, such as the manufacturing of tools, have been largely abandoned in favor of imported technologies. Modern transportation and extractive technologies in particular have often profoundly altered the relations of production and, hence, the nature of interactions with places. For example, a shift in transportation from canoes and hand-powered boats to powerboats with room to dwell and carry cargo allowed people to exploit resources in areas more remote from their permanent homes without establishing seasonal camps or settlements. Similarly, the development of roads and use of motor vehicles on the archipelago have altered patterns of engagement with upland resources, such as deer. These shifts have affected not only the way that places are inhabited and utilized but also the way they are conceptualized. Economic production and relations to place have been affected greatly by changes in social organization, specifically the transformation from a localized matrilineal clan structure to a community and regional tribal structure more consistent with non-Native socioeconomic organizations and subject to American law. These socioeconomic changes have severely undermined traditional Tlingit land and resource tenure systems, displacing the traditional communal systems with alien structures for managing common property resources (Langdon 1989). At the same Introduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being 9

time, among Tlingits there remains a strong allegiance to some aspects of traditional social organization and an implicit belief that Native management of their own places is in the best interest of both the resources and the people. Similarly, despite more than a century of Christian missionizing, the ritual life of Tlingits remains strong (though not unchanged), especially the memorial ku.éex’ (literally “to invite”), or potlatch, the central ritual in Tlingit ceremonial life (Kan 1989). Each fall and winter, dozens of memorial potlatches are mounted, involving thousands of Tlingits in lavish ceremonial feasts and exchanges to honor recently deceased relatives, while at the same time celebrating Tlingit personhood, social identity, and sense of place. While the cultural means by which Tlingits experience place have undergone considerable change, they continue to invest themselves in the land and to bind places to their identity and sense of being in very distinctive ways. It is tempting and all too common for observers to overestimate the impacts of technological change and overlook the ways Tlingits continue to relate themselves to places. “The most effective technology for nomadic people is one that can be carried around in their minds,” Robin Ridington (1990:12) reminds us; I term this cognitive technology “place intelligence.” Unfortunately, technology has too often been reduced to artifact, when it also involves artifice—place-based strategies and ways of knowing—that endure despite the adoption of new material technologies (see also Goulet 1998; Sharp 2001).

defining place It is surprising how many studies of place proceed without a definition of the central term, leaving place itself a rather “unclarified notion” (Casey 1997:xii). Admittedly, defining what philosophers have described as “the first of all things” can be difficult. The primary, phenomenal, and processual character of place seems to defy essentialist definitions. With these caveats in mind, I offer the following definition: A place is a framed space that is meaningful to a person or group over time. In some ways this definition is deceptively simple. But in analyzing it one finds that it contains three critical elements: space, time, and 10 Introduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being

experience. Each element is itself a phenomenon and a process requiring some explication.

Space It is common for people to confound space and place. Elemental space is an abstract physical concept that can be intuited but not experienced. As Walter (1988:142–43) observes, “Modern ‘space’ is universal and abstract, whereas a ‘place’ is concrete and particular. People do not experience abstract space; they experience places.” As Clifford Geertz (1996:262) puts it, “No one lives in the world in general. Everybody, even the exiled, the drifting, the diasporic, or the perpetually moving, lives in some confined, limited stretch of it—the world around here.” This is not to say that places are neatly confined or bounded, for indeed they are not. Rather, places are spaces that are framed through salient natural and social frameworks that individuals develop through experiences in nature and as members of a society to render “what would otherwise be a meaningless aspect of the scene into something that is meaningful” (Goffman 1974:21). Without our individual and collective frames of experience, space would remain boundless and indeterminate. For this reason many philosophers have argued for the ontological priority of place over space and other environmental elements. To exist at all, according to the phenomenologist philosopher Edward Casey (1993), is “to be implaced,” that is to say, put in a space that is concrete and particular. Casey shows how this proposition has deep roots in philosophy going back to the Pythagorean Archtas of Tarentum (428–347 BC), who reasoned, “Since everything that is in motion is moved in some place, it is obvious that one has to grant priority to place, in which that which causes motion or is acted upon will be. Perhaps, thus it is the first of all things, since all existing things are either in place or not without place” (in Casey 1993:14). It is impossible, then, to conceive of a space completely devoid of objects or boundaries without first envisioning concrete places as parameters for the “between-ness” of empty space. In human consciousness, space is preceded by place. Place is our most basic geographic unit. Phenomenologists argue that our concepts of space, time, and place Introduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being 11

must begin with our own physical constitution as embodied beings with certain corporeal orientations and sensory capacities. In his Critique of Pure Reason Immanuel Kant (1956:71) acknowledged that “it is . . . solely from a human standpoint that we can speak of space.” All space is therefore embodied (cf. Low 2003), and the same is true of time. As the anthropologist Nancy Munn (1996:449) argues, space-time is best considered as “a symbolic nexus of relations produced out of interactions between bodily actors and terrestrial spaces.” The importance of body in the experience and conceptualization of place is examined further below. One of the earliest social theorists to emphasize the human dimension of space was Émile Durkheim, who argued in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life that space is not the vague and indetermined medium which Kant imagined; if purely and absolutely homogenous, it would be of no use, and could not be grasped by the mind. Spatial representation consists essentially in a primary co-ordination of the data of sensuous experience. . . . To dispose things spatially there must be the possibility of placing them differently. . . . That is to say space could not be what it is if it were not, like time, divided and differentiated. But whence come these divisions which are so essential? All these distinctions evidently come from the fact that different sympathetic values have been attributed to various regions. ([1915] 1965:23; emphasis added)

For Durkheim the perception of space relied on more than just the phenomenology of perception and humans’ “organo-physical constitution”; spatial concepts were a reflection of society and a product of the individual’s experience within a particular social context.2 Both the phenomenological and cultural perspectives, I will argue, are critical to an understanding of the nature of place in Tlingit society. While Durkheim and others were moving toward a more humanistic geography, geography and the spatial sciences generally were moving in the opposite direction, one that de-emphasized the human dimension of space in favor of its more easily objectified elements, such as geometric coordinates and material resources. This rationalization of space also led to its being objectified in representational forms, like 12 Introduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being

maps. As Michel Foucault (1980:70) has remarked, this objectification led to changes in the interpretation of space as a medium: “Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile,” and carried an air of “anti-history. Time, in contrast, was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic.” “To speak of ‘social space’” in this context, remarks philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1991:1), “sounded strange.” The subordination of space to time has been traced to the development of certain navigational technologies in the seventeenth century (Casey 1993:8) and was boosted significantly by positivist developments in capitalistindustrial modes of production in the modernist era (Harvey 1989). Whatever its source, the movement to objectify and subordinate the spatial element in social life severely weakened social analyses because this important and constitutive element of social relations was taken for granted and underanalyzed. Echoing Durkheim, Foucault (1984:252, 246) points out the inherent problem with the objectivist perspective: “Space is fundamental in any form of communal life; space is fundamental in any exercise of power. . . . I think it is somewhat arbitrary to try to dissociate the effective practice of freedom by people, the practice of social relations and the spatial distributions in which they find themselves. If they are separated, they become impossible to understand. Each can only be understood through the other.” Once the human and cultural dimensions of space are recognized, it is possible to analyze sociocultural phenomena, including the exercise of power, emotion, symbol, and social relations within this dynamic medium of space. Similarly, with the realization that space is a product of cultural and environmental processes, one can begin to better understand the unity and diversity among human senses of place. The most important institution in the construction and maintenance of sociological space is social structure. Durkheim recognized the constitutive power of society in defining concepts of space. Others, such as Evans-Pritchard (1940) in his classic study of the Nuer, have explored how the sociological environment—social structure and the ebb and flow of social relations within this structure—can lead to the conceptualization of a sociological space and distance that is quite distinct from physical space and varies independently of physical distance. At the architectural level, Pierre Bourdieu (1973) and others have employed structuralist frames to analyze built environments, such as the Berber house, Introduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being 13

as microcosms of key symbolic relations between nature and culture, male and female, and other dichotomous forces. But Bourdieu (1977) and the praxis theorists, who have explored the relationship between habitus (culturally derived cognitive and behavior patterns and dispositions) and practice (self-interested manipulation of those patterns and dispositions), also have convincingly shown how space and other basic cultural concepts are not simply determined by a sui generis culture, as Durkheim would have it, or sprung from deep-seated, universally dichotomizing cognitive structures, as Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966; see also Descola and Pálsson 1996) suggests, but rather are subject to strategic manipulation by self-conscious and self-interested individuals within that culture. Thus, the social environment becomes a strategic context for defining both space and place. Spaces are not simply reproduced by cognitive and social structures but are also contested, refined, and reshaped by individuals through the practical experiences of living. Among the Tlingit, the relationship between sociological space and physical space has not been studied in detail. In her study of the Angoon Tlingit, however, Frederica de Laguna (1960:17–18) made an important observation on the role of social structure in shaping the individual Tlingit’s sense of history and geography: I believe it would be possible to show that the individual Tlingit’s sense of history and geography is strongly affected by the dominance of the sib [local clan or house group] which controls the social, political, and ceremonial aspects of his life. Tlingit histories are concerned with the origin of lineages or sibs, the quarrels or other events that caused such family groups to break away from their parent bodies or to leave their original homes, and the subsequent wanderings of these groups until they reached their present locations. The stories deal also with the supernatural occurrences upon which the claims to lineage and sib totemic crests are based, and lastly they tell of encounters with other sib groups. . . . The reality of this history is kept vivid because personal names, especially those that are assumed as titles, are derived from legendary or historic events, and those who bear them are reincarnations of the dead ancestors who took part in these events. Similarly certain localities, even though they may lie beyond the present boundaries of Tlin-

14 Introduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being

git country, must have special meaning, a special quality of reality for the sib members, because these places are the scenes of sib history. It is the sib that provides a sort of unity to geography and history, a “logic” which may prove to be more important than a purely spatial and temporal framework.

Following de Laguna’s lead, in chapter 2 I explore the logic of Tlingit social geography and how it functions to coordinate individual experience and relationships to place. While social structures organize people in space-time, ecological conditions also shape how people live there. The ecological environment includes the physical geography of space and place as well as human ecological variables, such as economic patterns, which structure how people make a living in a particular region. While the physical environment does not dictate conceptions of space and place, as the vulgar environmental determinism would have it, it does constrain them. As opposed to the strategic context of the social environment, the physical environment is a parametric context, meaning that its constraining influence typically functions independently of other variables, such as the social context.3 Thus, for example, although a great deal of variety is seen among the peoples of the Northwest Coast, all of them display a maritime or riverine orientation because the rugged upland environment all but prohibits other means of existence. However, much of human ecology, like the social environment, can be viewed as a strategic context where variables are dependent on one another. Thus, a particular mode of subsistence may be facilitated by a certain social structure (or structures) or vice versa. As an illustration of this, Allan Richardson (1982) shows how different types of social organization among Northwest Coast Indians can be correlated with variations of the spatiotemporal distribution of resources within this coastal rainforest ecosystem. The parametric constraints of the physical environment, combined with the strategic contexts of the social and ecological environments, serve to define the interrelationships between people and places. In summing up this discussion, it is worth noting that in defining the word place dictionaries typically refer to both the physical and social contexts of the environment. The most common definition of place, of course, refers to its being “a portion of space” or the physical envi-

Introduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being 15

ronment. But other definitions invoke the idea of a sociological ordering, as expressed, for example, in the phrase “to take one’s place.” Both of these orderings are vital to understanding the concept and role of place in human society.

Time Dictionary definitions of place also include the verb phrase “took place,” which denotes a temporal ordering. Just as space is basic to the concept of place, so, too, is time. Part of the postmodern critique of anthropology has focused on traditional ethnology’s reification of the ethnographic present and consequent neglect of historical contingencies that define particular groups in particular settings at particular times (e.g., Fabian 1983; Wolf 1982). Places are products of history; to ignore this fact is to risk missing a good deal of their nuance and meaning. Even the functionalist Bronislaw Malinowski (1922:330) was sensitive to this, pointing out long ago that named places often serve as historical markers on the landscape, symbolizing and bringing forth events of the past and making them “tangible and permanent” through the enduring features of the landscape. It is impossible to comprehend the meaning of such places without knowing something of their history. But there is even more to it than this. In distilling events of the past into a geographic present, places also reach across time, making elements of the past accessible to those who have not experienced them directly. In this sense, places are not only situated in historical time and space, but they also situate time and space through their symbolism, be it in place-names or other associations that succinctly reference events of the past. Time is thus “part of our experiences of places, for these experiences must be bound up with flux or continuity. And places themselves are the present expressions of past experiences and events and of hopes for the future” (Relph 1976:33). One social theorist who has shed considerable light on the relationship between time, space, and place is Anthony Giddens, whose structuration theory parallels in many respects Bourdieu’s theory of practice. Giddens (1984:127) argues that all social interaction is contextual— “situated” in time and space—yet stretches across time-space “dis16 Introduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being

tances,” and that it is the business of social theory “to try to grasp how it comes about that the situated action which is the ‘materiality’ of social life intersects with the form of institutions which span large ‘stretches’ of time-space.” In an effort to remake a social theory that is sensitive not only to social structures and space but also to human agency and time, Giddens and others (e.g., Pred 1990) have drawn on concepts of temporality from the philosophy of Heidegger, the history of Fernand Braudel, and the time-geography of Torsten Hägerstrand. In his existential philosophy of Being and time, Heidegger introduces the concept of Dasein, usually translated as “Being-in-the-world” (Heidegger 1962). Dasein emphasizes the phenomenological experience of place and the “presencing” (or becoming “present-at-hand”) that occurs in encounters with place. Presencing involves, among other things, the transcendence of time in place, a gathering and uniting of time(s) and space(s) in a unique ensemble. This transcendental quality of place enables places to fuse elements of history and the landscape in the human consciousness. Places, then, may serve as “mnemonic pegs” (Basso 1984a:43), or what Mikhail Bakhtin (1981:84–85) calls “chronotopes,” for the collective memory. Chronotopes are “points in the geography of a community where time and space intersect and fuse. Time takes on flesh and becomes visible for human contemplation; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time and history and the enduring character of a people. . . . Chronotopes thus stand as monuments to the community itself, as symbols of it, as forces operating to shape its members’ images of themselves” (cited in Basso 1984a:43–44). Like Heidegger’s Dasein, Bahktin’s concept of the chronotope, perhaps best translated as space-time or place-time, represents the merging of temporal and spatial sequences, where neither space nor time can be understood without reference to the other. As poignant means of materializing time in space, places and their referents (place-names, images, and the like) become important and powerful chronotopes for orienting and shaping audiences’ “images of themselves” in narrative, song, and other media. Among the Tlingit, as with Keith Basso’s Western Apache, the landscape helps not only to make history but also to hold it in place, “as a repository of distilled wisdom, a stern but benevolent keeper of tradition” (1996:63). As de Laguna (1972, 1:58) points out, Introduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being 17

The human meanings of the landscape are more than the mythological dimension recognized by Malinowski. . . . They involve not simply places visited and transformed by Raven in the mythical past, but places hallowed by human ancestors. For individuals, of course, the world has special meanings, for there are places about which their grandparents and parents have told them, spots they have visited in their youth, or where they still go. None of these personal associations are completely private; all are intermeshed through anecdote or shared experiences.

It is one of the unique features of places that they gather, intermesh, and crystallize time in this way. Another method to analyze the temporal dimension of place in personal terms is through time-geography. Developed by the Swedish geographer Hägerstrand (cf. 1975) time-geography involves plotting the spatial course of daily life on a three-dimensional plane showing time, space, path (time-space sequencing), and project. Hägerstrand seeks to spatialize time, giving separation as distance to separation as time. Using his spatial notation to track individuals’ time-geographies, it is possible to analyze the spatial contexts and time-space routines that constitute daily life in particular places. When individual map “biographies” are aggregated or superimposed, intersections between individuals’ paths and projects are given geometric form, and the important “stations” or locales of human interaction can be viewed. As Giddens (1985:266) observes, Hägerstrand’s time-geography is important because it highlights five facets of “time-geographic reality” that “express the material axes of human existence and underlie all contexts of association in conditions of co-presence.” These facets are (1) the indivisibility of the body and the limitations corporeality imposes on movement and perception; (2) the finite life span of humans across space and time; (3) the limited capacity of humans to participate in more than one activity (multitasking aside) and the recognition that every task has a duration; (4) the fact that movement in space is also movement in time; and (5) the limited “packing capacity” of time-space, such that two persons cannot occupy precisely the same space at the same time. Through his system of notation representing the physical ontology of beings in time-space, Hägerstrand seeks to elucidate the “‘fundamental bonds’ among life, time, and space” and to provide a “situational ecology,” or 18 Introduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being

schema for demonstrating how commitment to any precisely situated activity constrains subsequent daily activity participation” (Pred 1990:20). By charting the competitive flow of “interrelated presences and absences” between people and spaces, Hägerstrand’s spatialized biographies provide a basis for a phenomenological understanding of individuals’ relationships with places. It also underscores the unique system of cognitive maps, or what anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace (see 2003) terms “mazeways,” possessed by any individual within a (necessarily heterogeneous) culture. Giddens appropriates Hägerstrand’s muscular geography but faults him for a weak sociology. To compensate, he combines Hägerstrand’s emphasis on tracking the individual corporeal being in time-space with two sociogeographical concepts from his theory of structuration, locale and regionalization, which emphasize the organization of the settings of interaction and their relation to human agency and individual paths and projects in space. “Locales refer to the use of space to provide the settings of interaction in turn being essential to specifying its contextuality” (Giddens 1985:271). Thus, locales are more than simply points in space. They are places defined by the predictable human interactions and activities that occur there as much as by the physical setting itself. They may be as small as a street corner or as large as a nation-state. Correlatively, regionalization is the “zoning of time-space in relation to routinised practices” (272). For example, rooms or floors of a house, whether it be a Tlingit clan house or an American nuclear family home, may be zoned for certain activities in space, and certain parts of the day may be reserved expressly for some activities while others are considered taboo. For Giddens space and time are strategic components of social action, not simply containers for it. As David Harvey (1989:211– 12) and Foucault stress, from a political economy perspective, they are also strategic components of hegemony and domination. Giddens also offers a more general evaluation of changes in the construction of time-space that have come as a result of modernity. Since the eighteenth century, he argues, face-to-face interactions have become less central to social integration because of technological and organizational innovations. As a consequence, the everyday spheres of social life have become “disembedded” from the here and now, although they still exist at the abstract level, through what he calls “time-space disIntroduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being 19

tanciation.” By recognizing these processes of disembedding and timespace distanciation, Giddens attempts to account for the absences as well as presences in modern social life. This concept is closely related to Harvey’s (1989) concept of “time-space compression,” a phenomenon he traces to changes in material production, specifically the move from conventional “Fordist” assembly line–style industrial production, which was rigidly organized and spatially centered, to the present-day “flexible accumulation” mode of production, epitomized by its fluidity in time and space and flexibility in exploiting labor and markets. Flexible accumulation has led to a compression of time-space because “time horizons of both public and private decision-making have shrunk, while satellite communication and declining transport costs have made it increasingly possible to spread those decisions immediately over an ever wider and variegated space” (1989:147). As shall be seen, the timespace distanciation and time-space compression that have accompanied modernization and development in Southeast Alaska have had a profound effect on Tlingit person-place relations. Another concept of temporality that has informed modern place theory is historian Fernand Braudel’s notion of a spatialized time. Braudel and the French Annales school helped to launch a paradigmatic shift in historical writing, moving away from chronicling the major events and figures of a particular era and toward a focus on the activities of ordinary people over long periods of time (la longue durée). Braudel viewed time from three perspectives, which he outlines in the introduction to The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1972:20–21). The first and most basic temporality, according to Braudel, is that of natural time, or “geographical history.” Geographical history is one “whose passage is almost imperceptible, that of man in his relationship to the environment, a history in which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles” (1972:20). Braudel was critical of the lack of deference typically given to the natural setting in historical writing, believing it was myopic to view natural history merely as a backdrop rather than a major, continuous constraint on human activity. Social time, “the history of groups and groupings,” is Braudel’s second temporal perspective. From this perspective one can track the durée 20 Introduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being

of sociocultural institutions, of demographic fluctuations, and of other dimensions of social life that carry on well beyond the life span of an individual or generation. Braudel’s third frame is the durée of daily life, filled with remembrances of specific events and personalities. This is the perspective that is richest in human interest and, as a consequence, tends to draw the most attention from historians. But for Braudel these events and personalities are only “surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs” (21). In contrast, for Giddens and Hägerstrand the events of daily life and how they reproduce or reconfigure time-space routines and other aspects of social structure (and social time) represent an important temporal frame of analysis. Undoubtedly, all three dimensions of time converge in the individual’s experience of place, making history a key component of place. It is worth noting that Braudel’s three temporalities correspond in some ways to Tlingits’ own spatialized sense of time. An analog to Braudel’s natural time is the Tlingit notion of “mythic” time (tlakw, “eternal”), the primordial (but not temporally fixed) era in which the formation of the world took shape, including elements of the physical and social worlds that continue to structure human life. Although the events of mythic time are rooted deep in the past, this history is ongoing and recurring in the sense that Tlingits continually make reference to their existence and being in relation to these events and their settings. Thus the Old Woman of the Tides is not merely a remote mythical figure but a continuing phenomenal presence in the ebb and flow of daily sea tides. This temporality is also embodied in the Tlingit concept of shagóon, often translated as “heritage and destiny.” As I shall demonstrate in chapter 2, this construction of identity fuses spatial and temporal dimensions in powerful ways. Tlingits also give high priority to social history, including clan histories, historical relations between social groups, and interactions with non-Tlingit peoples and institutions. And finally, Tlingits have a category of historic time, akin to Braudel’s durée of daily life, which is largely contained within the past century or several generations and includes remembrances of daily life, events, personalities, and, of course, places. In sum, Dasein, time-geography and structuration, and notions of historical temporality and durée are all important analytical tools for Introduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being 21

defining the phenomenon of place. Although different cultures may conceptualize time in different ways, time is everywhere inseparable from place because it is through temporally situated interactions with specific locales that cultural and individual conceptions of place are formed. Thus, as Casey (1993:21) observes, place proves to be a deeply constitutive, indeed an irreplaceable, factor in the phenomenon of time and its understanding. There is no (grasping of ) time without place. . . . Place situates time by giving it a local habitation. Time arises from places and passes (away) between them. It also vanishes into places at its edges and as its edges. For the “positions” of time are its effective limits, without which . . . time would not be able to present itself to us, would not be timelike or temporal in the first place.

As I shall discuss in more detail, Tlingits have their own temporalities and distinctive linguistic and cultural means of transcending and otherwise reckoning time with place.

Experience The third key element in defining place is experience. Unlike abstract spaces, places are infused with meaning and value through the process of human experience. “Every event happens somewhere,” writes Walter (1988:117), “but we don’t often locate it by its longitude and latitude. We say this experience happened to me in Manchester, or I felt this way in New York, or I did such and such in Boston.” The episodes, feelings, and activities that characterize experience serve to construct places in our minds. The boundaries and scale of place are likewise framed by experience. The “fireplace and the home are both places; a distinctive region is a place, and so is a nation” (Tuan 1975:153). Each setting is meaningful as a place because it is the locus of experience. Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1977:6) suggests experiences with places can be “direct and intimate” or “indirect and conceptual.” Thus, places acquire meaning both from primary apperception of the landscape through sensual experience and through indirect experiences of place conveyed exclusively by symbols encoded in language and other cul22 Introduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being

tural forms, such as songs, stories, poems, names, recipes, games, festivals, tools, crafts, and art.4 These cultural forms codify not only knowledge and conceptions of place but also feelings toward place. Folklorist Mary T. Hufford (1986:49) has suggested that cultural forms that are inextricably “bound to their locales,” indeed “all things that are crafted out of the imagination’s encounter with the land and its resources,” can be considered “genres of place.” Genres of place reveal not only human adaptation to and integration with local environments but also broader aspects of an ecological consciousness based on sensuous experience, or as Hufford puts it, “an ability to make sense of the environment, not only to tell what is there, but to understand the relationships between environmental elements” (1987:16; see also Hufford 1992, Ryden 1993). The physical experience of the environment is mediated not only by the senses but by the body itself. As Tuan (1977:34) points out, drawing on cultural and phenomenological theory: Space is an abstract term for a complex set of ideas. People of different cultures differ in how they divide up their world, assign value to its parts, and measure them. . . . Nonetheless certain cross-cultural similarities exist, and they rest ultimately on the fact that man is the measure of all things. That is to say, if we look for fundamental principles of spatial organization, we find them in two facts: the posture and structure of the human body, and the relations (whether close or distant) between human beings.

Citing examples from around the world, Tuan goes on to show how, “in a literal sense, the human body is the measure of direction, location, and distance” (1977:44). Why should such a pattern exist? According to the French phenomenologist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962), spatial terms are necessarily anthropocentric because the body is not only a universal standard of measure for humans, but it is also the ultimate mediator of their perception. When the body is viewed as the first and most essential environment one inhabits and possesses a priori, before enculturation, it is easy to see why it is commonly referenced in descriptions of the larger physical environment. As Marcel Mauss asserts, “The body is man’s first and most natural instrument . . . man’s first and most natural technical object, and at the same time [his] technical means” Introduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being 23

(1979:104). To posit this is not to deny that different cultures conceive of the body differently; rather, it is to suggest that the body is the ultimate arbiter of human interaction with the environment: My body continually takes me into place. It is at once agent and vehicle, articulator and witness of being-in-place. Although we rarely attend to its exact role, once we do we cannot help but notice its importance. Without . . . our bodies, not only would we be lost in place—acutely disoriented and confused—we would have no coherent sense of place itself. Nor could there be any such thing as lived places, i.e., places in which we live and move and have our being. Our living-moving bodies serve to structure and configurate entire scenarios of place. (Casey 1993:48)

Our precognitive embodiment of place affects both our direct and indirect experiences of place. It not only mediates our physical interaction with places but, as a metaphor and schema, structures how we conceptualize and talk about place (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; M. Johnson 1987). Thus, anatomical references are common in place-names, and allusions to bodily movement, hazards, sustenance, and so on are necessarily employed in geographic narratives to orient the listener. This view is very much in keeping with the “experiential realist” school of thought that has emerged in the cognitive sciences (Lakoff and Johnson 1999; see also Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991). According to George Lakoff (1987:xiv), one of the school’s main proponents, “Thought is embodied, that is, the structures used to put together our conceptual systems grow out of bodily experience and make sense in terms of it; moreover, the core of our conceptual systems is directly grounded in perception, body movement, and experience of a physical and social character.” Thus, the body, as prototypical environment, becomes a preconceptual cognitive tool for classifying natural phenomena as well as a key metaphor for interpreting experience. The experiential realist school offers itself as an alternative to the objectivist “mind-as-machine” view, spawned by René Descartes’ notion of thought as abstract and disembodied, and the extreme form of linguistic relativism, which posits that the nature of experience is determined not by cognitive universals such as embodiment but by the arbitrary and varying linguistic and cognitive structures possessed by different cultures. 24 Introduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being

Another important set of constraints in defining the experience of place is what Franz Boas (1934:14) broadly defines as “cultural interests.” Cultural interests involve not only basic subsistence and economic needs but also such things as orientation, safety, and recreation. For the Kwakiutl (Kwakwaka’wakw) whom Boas studied and other groups such interests help to differentiate places and to structure interactions with specific locales. Boas noted in particular how cultural interests are reflected in place naming. Thus, a narrow marine pass between two islands might be labeled not explicitly for its topography but rather as a “place where you harpoon seals,” citing the cultural phenomenon that occurs there. The human activity, the cultural interest, comes to stand for the place itself through the principle of metonymic association. The experience of making a living in an environment is central to what it means to “inhabit” a place as opposed to simply observing or passing through it. Dwelling is what transforms space into a lebensraum (living space). As the writer Wendell Berry (1977:22) explains: The concept of country, homeland, dwelling place becomes simplified as “the environment”—that is, what surrounds us. Once we see our place, our part of the world, as surrounding us, we have already made a profound division between it and ourselves. We have given up the understanding—dropped it out of our language and so out of our thought—that we and our country create one another, depend on one another; that our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of our land; that we and our land are part of one another, so all who are living as neighbors here, human and plant and animal, are part of one another, and so cannot possibly flourish alone; that, therefore, our culture must be our response to our place, our culture and our places are images of each other and inseparable from each other, and so neither can be better than the other.

These sentiments are echoed in Heidegger’s (1971) seminal essay, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in which he traces the concepts “to dwell” and “to build” back to the same German verb, bauen. Dwelling, Heidegger observes, implies such things as “sparing” and “preserving” places as well as “cultivating” them, while building merely denotes constructing things. Unfortunately, in modern usage, the “dwelling” nuance of bauen has been eclipsed by the notion of “building” or constructIntroduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being 25

ing, despite the centrality of the concept of dwelling to place, experience, and sense of being. Dwelling breeds a certain intimacy through everyday experience that is often profoundly different from the peak experiences that may accompany a fleeting encounter with place. As Tim Ingold (2000:192) stresses: “A place owes its character to the experiences it affords to those who spend time there—to the sights, sounds and indeed smells that constitute its specific ambience. And these, in turn, depend on the kinds of activities in which its inhabitants engage. It is from this relational context of people’s engagement with the world, in the business of dwelling, that each place draws its unique significance.” In Southeast Alaska this contrast is evident in the way that Alaska Natives and tourists encounter the same landscapes. While tourists tend to marvel in Muir-like mystical terms at the fabulous peaks, glaciers, fjords, and other physical features of grandeur, Tlingits, at least in their own locales, are more likely to perceive and characterize places in terms of the practical activities that engage them, what ecological psychologists (J. J. Gibson 1979; see also Ingold 2000) term “affordances” (e.g., “a good fishing hole,” “egg gathering country,” or “dangerous rapids”), or in terms of their social geography and history (e.g., “That’s Coho [clan] country,” or “That’s where Raven made his swing”). Of course, Tlingits have peak landscape experiences too, and extraordinary onetime encounters with place— both good and bad—comprise an important genre of their oral traditions. But the negotiation of mundane affordances in the process of dwelling is more central to Tlingit place making than the extreme geographies produced and consumed through tourism. In his innovative work The Experience of Landscape, Jay Appleton (1975) suggests that one’s reactions to particular landscapes are in fact conditioned by basic human needs such as finding resources (prospect) and shelter (refuge) and avoiding “hazards,” the fulfillment of which is critical to survival and evolutionary success. Combining the experientialist philosophy of John Dewey with insights of nineteenth-century British landscape and aesthetics philosophers, such as John Ruskin, Appleton fashions a “habitat theory” in order to explain how experience has informed human aesthetic responses: “Aesthetic satisfaction, experienced in the contemplation of landscape, stems from the spontaneous perception of landscape features which, in their shapes, colours, 26 Introduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being

spatial arrangements and other visible attributes, act as sign stimuli indicative of environmental conditions favourable to survival, whether they are favourable or not. This proposition we call habitat theory” (69). A corollary to this is prospect-refuge theory, which “postulates that, because the ability to see without being seen is an intermediate step in the satisfaction of many of those [biological] needs, the capacity of an environment to ensure the achievement of this becomes a more immediate source of aesthetic satisfaction” (73). Using the principles of prospect, refuge, and hazard, Appleton develops a framework for classifying landscape imagery and symbolism in evolutionary ecological terms. In this scheme, well-illuminated vistas and panoramas symbolize prospect and are pleasing because they provide a vantage point for the hunter in pursuit of food. Similarly, refuges are attractive because these landscapes provide cover and defensible shelter necessary for survival. Those features of the landscape that block or prevent human survival are classified as hazards. Appleton contends that these associative principles inform all humans’ intellectual and emotional responses to landscapes and thus help to define the human experience of landscape. Appleton even marshals ethnographic data from the Tlingit—Aurel Krause’s (1956:125) nineteenth-century descriptions of Chilkat hunters patiently waiting in blinds for hours until game approaches—in support of his notion that the combination of searching (prospect) and hiding (refuge) is fundamental to human survival and thus the key to aesthetics (Appleton 1975:72–73). However, he makes no attempt to apply his aesthetics response theory to Tlingit or other Northwest Coast art. Indeed such a task would seem problematic, as Northwest Coast art is highly stylized and typically represents the landscape in rather abstract terms having little resemblance to what one might conceive of as natural prospects, refuges, or hazards, but everything to do with Tlingits’ sense of being in relation to those sites (a point I shall return to later). Thus, despite the elegance and utility of his prospect-refuge theory, Appleton’s aesthetics, which continue to influence evolutionary theorists (cf. Pinker 1997:374–78), provide little explanation for the vast differences found in the art and landscape representations of different cultures, or how Northwest Coast art in particular gives complex “voice to the many forms of interconnecting life and consciousness that cooperate to manifest the world” (S. Brown 2000:112) as experienced by emplaced individuals. Introduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being 27

Along with these biological and materialist concerns that mediate experience in and responses to environments in direct and—if one accepts Appleton’s thesis—uniform ways are the more indirect experiences of place through other expressive cultural forms or genres. As A. Irving Hallowell (1967:7) long ago pointed out: The representations of objects and events of all kinds play as characteristic a role in man’s total behavior as does the direct presentation of objects and events in perception. Thus skill in the manipulation of symbols is directly involved with the development of man’s rational capacities. But symbolization is likewise involved with all other psychic functions—attention, perception, interest, memory, dreams, imagination, etc. Representative processes are at the root of man’s capacity to deal with the abstract qualities of objects and events, his ability to deal with the possible or conceivable, the ideal as well as the actual, the intangible along with the tangible, the absent as well as the present object or event, with fantasy and with reality.

While some theorists, such as cultural materialists, tend to regard these “indirect” representational processes as subordinate to ecological variables when it comes to place making, others have shown convincingly that they are central to the construction of landscape and memory (cf. Schama 1995). Basso (1984a:48) argues that materialist models of the landscape “ignore the fact that American Indians, like groups of people everywhere, maintain a complex array of symbolic relationships with their physical surroundings, and that those relationships, which may have little to do with the serious business of making a living, play a fundamental role in shaping other forms of social activity.” He goes on to outline his vision of a “cultural ecology that is cultural in the fullest sense, a broader and more flexible approach to the study of man-land relationships in which the symbolic properties of environmental phenomena receive the same kind of care and attention that has traditionally been given to their material counterparts” (49). In fact the distinction between direct and indirect experience, between the material and the symbolic worlds, is impossible to make in these Native American ontologies. Among Tlingits, as among Basso’s Apaches and Hallowell’s Objiwa (see Black 1977:101–2), indigenous ways of knowing and modes of perception allow for “the expectation that indi28 Introduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being

viduals will ‘see’ different objects in the same landscape, will ‘hear’ different sounds . . . [and] that the same entity may appear in different forms from one time to another.” And yet these different ways of seeing are accommodated within broader cultural frames that are held in common. A great virtue of looking at culture through the perspective and experience of place is that both individual and collective perceptions are embraced, and material and symbolic components of the environment are not artificially separated but rather inextricably intertwined. Similarly, in studying place feelings need not be subordinated or divorced from cognition, for emotion is basic to the way we sense and think about our world (Milton 2002). Perhaps nowhere is this more evident in Tlingit than in the processes of place making through expressive cultural forms, or genres of place, which are at once representations of places and ways of sensing them. They constitute what Ingold (2000) terms the “poetics of dwelling.”

expressive culture, multimediacy, and genres of place The phenomenal experience of place forges complex symbolic and material relationships with the landscape, which emphasize “dwelling” in the Heideggerian sense. As I have suggested, these complex relationships can be understood not only by examining key cultural structures that forge them but also through the uniquely expressive cultural forms, or “genres” of place, that represent them. Tlingits have a term for genres of place that take on sacred status as possessions: at.óow (literally “owned things”). At.óow include not only geographic sites themselves but also material and symbolic resources that Tlingit matrilineages identify with as emblematic (and chronotopic) of their being and relations to specific environs. At.óow are deployed, most poignantly in ritual, to bolster individual and collective claims about identity, being, place, and other prerogatives. At.óow are both representations and tools of emplacement. In the absence of being there, they give to place a sense of tangibility through their immediacy and multimediacy. As Angoon elder Lydia George explained to me, the places Tlingits hold sacred tend to have four ingreIntroduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being 29

dients: a name, a story, a song (typically accompanied by a dance), and a design (or crest). Each of these ingredients is itself an at.óow, a chronotope, and a genre of place. Together they constitute a cultural nexus of sacredness that endows places, and the people who possess them, with profound webs of significance. In the potent context of ritual, at.óow may go beyond multimediacy and take on a spiritual agency such that participants sense they have been literally transported to ancestral places (see chap. 5). Stories and songs are components of oral tradition, which may contain just about any enduring notion, belief, or narrative of place that is consciously transmitted from one generation to the next. Through the plots and settings of story and song societies define themselves in time and space. While not all myths are explicitly explanatory or didactic in nature, through their settings, characters, and tropes these narratives chronicle human relations with the landscape over time. When discussing native place-names in an area, Tlingits often make the general comment that “all these places have stories behind them,” the implication being that vital parts of Tlingit history, and thus their own history and identity, are, to quote Munn ([1973] 1986:214–15) on the Walbiri, “carried in the experience of the country as a network of objectifiable places, the prime givens of the external environment.” For groups that stress oral tradition, “excursions into the past are meticulously marked onto the landscape” rather than a calendar (Rosaldo 1980:48). In Tlingit oral tradition, time is reckoned by era, as suggested above, but precise dates are not often important. In contrast, place and setting are usually reckoned with precision. For the Tlingit, like the Western Apache (Basso 1988:110), “nothing is considered more basic to the effective telling of a . . . ‘story’ or ‘narrative’ . . . than identifying the geographical locations at which events in the story unfold.” This is not because the settings are obscure; on the contrary, it is because they are well known as physical and symbolic landmarks. For unless Apache listeners are able to picture a physical setting for narrative events (unless, as one of my consultants said, “your mind can travel to the place and really see it”), the events themselves will be difficult to imagine. This is because events in the narrative will seem to “happen nowhere” (dohwaa’agodzaa da), and such an idea, Apaches assert, is both 30 Introduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being

preposterous and disquieting. Placeless events are an impossibility; everything that happens must happen somewhere. The location of an event is an integral aspect of the event itself, and therefore identifying the event’s location is essential to properly depicting—and effectively picturing—the event’s occurrence. (10)

As Leslie Marmon Silko (1990:888) observes for the Pueblo, this depicting and picturing is also critical in that “often . . . the turning point in the narrative [involves] a peculiarity or special quality of a rock or tree or plant found only at that place.” Because place is so central to oral tradition, place-names are often key elements of narrative and history. But they also stand on their own as a domain of knowledge, identity, and at.óow and therefore as a genre of place. As linguistic artifacts on the land, place-names function not only to define places but also to re-present them in human knowledge, thought, and speech. Naming, of course, is a ubiquitous cultural trait born of the need to communicate distinctions between persons, places, and things. Place naming in particular is motivated by the desire to distinguish meaningful spaces from space in general. Some philosophers maintain that a place cannot exist unless it has a name. While this may be going too far, there is no denying that place-names are “richly evocative symbols” (Basso 1988) conveying a wealth of information about the spaces they signify and the cultures that speak them. As icons, indexes, and symbols of place phenomena, place-names have enormous referential power. They evoke not only material aspects of the landscape but also human tasks, events, emotions, and other mental associations tied to those locales. As Lévi-Strauss (1966:168) rightly observes, “Space is a society of named places, just as people are landmarks within the group.” Thus, “both are designated by proper names, which can be substituted for each other in many circumstances common to many societies.” This pattern is strongly evident in Tlingit naming, as illustrated in chapter 2.5 Visual iconography, the at.óow of design, comprises another important expressive medium though which people represent sacred relationships to place. Tlingit icons and motifs in visual art work on a number of different levels. They reference events, emotions, kin, places, and other themes that are fundamental to individual and social group identity. Introduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being 31

The most sacred icons are clan crests, manifestations of animals, places, and other entities, which are incorporated into artistic designs, regalia, and other cultural forms. Crests, observed de Laguna (1972, 1:451), “are, from the native point of view, the most important feature of the matrilineal sib or lineage, acquired in the remote past by the ancestors and determining the nature and destiny of their descendants.” This combination of heritage and destiny, or shagóon, is believed to be embodied in the sacred property of the matrilineage and also in the social group members themselves. Each crest, too, has a story “behind it” that evokes elements of the present landscape in relation to the distant past. Animals were taken as crests typically because of specific events that occurred at particular places involving them and members of the social group. In other cases geographic places, themselves animate, were adopted as crests. When a place was appropriated as a crest, its image served to link indelibly particular social groups to particular terrains. In many cases, as I shall show, the social groups actually derive their names from these locales, and thus the crests serve to fuse members’ identities, origins, and history. In this way, crests and other visual art, as representations of places, endow portions of the landscape with multiple layers of meaning and identify them as the property and heritage of specific social groups, and the landscape itself is continuously defined and redefined through iconography. Thus, although Tlingit art differs markedly in style from most Euro-American landscape art, both constitute genres of place because they explicitly appropriate and idealize places and therefore shape the perception and experience of those landscapes. Names, stories, songs, and crest designs represent genres of place that have been ritually sanctified as at.óow. But more mundane aspects of culture, such as local technologies, can also be considered genres of place. A good example of this is the Barnegat Bay sneakbox, a small boat developed by inhabitants of the New Jersey Pine Barrens for hunting and fishing. It was custom made for the marshes of estuaries of South Jersey. In its form we see every contingency neatly anticipated. Its spoon-shaped hull enables it to glide through areas marked as land on coastal maps. . . . [It] is light enough for one man to haul over land between channels. It is equipped with 32 Introduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being

a mast-hole, centerboard well, and detachable rudder for sailing; winter and summer sails; folding oarlocks and a removable decoy rack to suppress its profile; runners for traveling on ice; and two kinds of accessory ice hooks for breaking up slushy (“porridge”) and hard (“pane”) ice. Its sloping transom allows a hunter to row backward in channels that are too narrow to turn around in. . . . In the sneakbox the shapes of men and meadows are fused. (Hufford 1987:32)

For Hufford, this technology “comprises a distinctive response to distinctively regional conditions, a tool whereby local men distinguish themselves as inhabitants of a singular region” (1990:50). Its form and function also reveal a deep understanding and experience of place, and the technology itself “synthesizes the observations of generations of baymen of water, land, air, man, and mud.” In this way the material technology not only comes to symbolize the place itself and but also serves as a unique extension of the body and the senses in experiencing place. What is more, objects of material culture take on emplaced “biographies” within communities, as they are passed on from generation to generation. For this reason, material culture provides an ideal frame for evaluating what Peter Jordan (2003:306) terms “landscape enculturation,” because it is through the manufacture, use, transmission, and deposition of material artifacts that “communities bring rich symbolic meanings to the landscapes they inhabit, and at the same time transform the physical terrain.” The same sense of place is evident in the Tlingit gudiyé, a specialized seal hunting canoe apparently first developed for use among the ice floes of Icy Bay by its Eyak and Tlingit inhabitants. These nimble craft were built with a heavy prow and equipped with a special wooden protuberance off the bow designed to quietly push aside the glacial ice as hunters stalked their prey. They were so well adapted to the ice-filled bays of the Gulf of Alaska that their inventors reportedly kept them hidden in a secret lake called Ligaas.aa, “Tabooed Lake,” above Icy Bay (de Laguna 1972, 1:97). Protected and celebrated, these marvels of marine technology seem to have attained the status of at.óow for their Yakutat possessors. Yet, in Glacier Bay, just one hundred miles to the south, Huna Tlingits developed a very different but equally adaptive technological genre of place to aid in seal hunting in this larger, less Introduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being 33

ice-choked bay: glacier-white camouflage clothing and outrigged white blinders for canoes. Here, visual cover, as opposed to auditory cover or tight maneuverability, was critical to successful sealing, and so the processes of landscape enculturation differed. Finally, in addition to producing rich material and symbolic genres of place, the human experience of place engenders profound feelings toward the landscape. These affective ties may be strongly positive, indicative of what Tuan (1974:93) and others call “topophilia,” or they may also be profoundly negative, engendering “topophobia,” especially when associated with danger or tragedy. Either way, affective ties to place are derived from individual and collective experience of the landscape rather than the physical environment itself. Cultural structures mediate our interactions and experiences with a particular place and consequently help to define our sense of place. Through bodily engagement, inhabitation, dwelling, and cultural frames we become familiar and intimate with many places, find security in some, and ultimately come to identify with them. In this way “places become a point of departure from which we orient ourselves in the world” (Relph 1976:43).

conclusion The power and dynamics of place have received expanded attention in recent years. In this chapter I have laid out an operational definition of place and an ethnographic means of exploring humans’ senses of place across cultures. I have defined place not as an object or geographic given but as a set of phenomenal and cultural processes consisting of three elemental dimensions—space, time, and experience. These dimensions are culturally and environmentally mediated and exist in synergistic and synesthetic webs of interanimation. Unfortunately, past analyses of place have often tended to emphasize one dimension of place to the neglect or exclusion of the other two. In contrast, a holistic anthropological perspective of place contributes to the knowledge of both culture and geography and the dynamic, organic ties that link them. Through such a perspective, a foundation is laid for understanding Tlingits’ senses of place and being, and those of other societies, as cultural processes. Among the Tlingit and other indigenous groups there are at least four 34 Introduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being

key cultural structures that mediate relationships between people and place: social organization, language and cognitive structures, material production, and ritual. In the remaining chapters I examine in detail each of these cultural structures in action—through Tlingit processes of dwelling—to show how individual and collective Tlingit notions of place, being, and identity are forged.

Introduction: Place and Tlingit Senses of Being 35

2 know your place The Social Organization of Geographic Knowledge

Aadooséi yee xoo gunei yakwáan (Who is an outsider among us)? [A Tlingit rhetorical expression of belonging, sometimes used to punctuate the recounting of a social history weaving various social groups together in time and space]. —herman kitka sr.

“How is it that you know about all of these places so far from your homeland?” I asked Sitka Kaagwaantaan elder Herman Kitka Sr., after one of our early work sessions documenting his extensive knowledge of indigenous place-names outside of the Sitka area where he lives. “I guess you could say that’s my family background,” he replied. “My relatives told me about these places as part of our history, and they always referred to them by their Tlingit names,” he added. “I got to know a lot of them firsthand, too, because I fished pretty near all over southeastern Alaska, even down to Puget Sound and on up to Prince William Sound.” For Herman Kitka and the Tlingit, indeed all indigenous peoples, social organization is both a response to place and a constitutive force in shaping individual and collective senses of place. This chapter first explores the ways in which the fundamental units of Tlingit social structure evolved in relation to Southeast Alaskan geography and what this means for the production and maintenance of geographic knowledge. Second, it examines the power of Tlingit social geography in organizing ethnogeographic knowledge and shaping individual consciousness of place. The role of fishing and other practical activities in the development of place consciousness, also alluded to by Mr. Kitka, is taken up in chapter 4. The key role of social structure in the formation of Tlingit geographic knowledge was first remarked on by de Laguna (1960:17–18), who spec36

ulated on the strong force that the matrilineal sib (or clan) exerts over a Tlingit individual’s “sense of history and geography.” De Laguna also recognized that Tlingit territory at the most fundamental level was conceptualized not in terms of large swaths of land but rather as constellations of points or locales. These named locales typically marked sites of importance to the social history of the group and were enlivened and enriched by experience on the land, tutelage by elders, and two distinctive animating features of Tlingit social structure: at.óow (owned things) and shagóon (heritage or destiny). By examining these features of social structure from an evolutionary, ethnogeographic perspective one can understand how Tlingit social structure integrates personhood and place. In analyzing the evolution of Tlingit social structure in relation to place, I am most interested in the period prior to the effects of extensive contact with non-Natives beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. The “traditional” portrait is, of course, an idealized temporal composite in the sense that Tlingit territorial boundaries were in a constant state of maintenance and flux as a result of the abundance and distribution of resources, intra- and interethnic conflicts and tensions, and other variables. This record of shifting territoriality in relation to such factors as migration, war, population growth and decline, natural disasters, trade, and so on is significant and well documented in the Tlingit historical record. Still, evolutionary changes in precontact Tlingit sociogeographic organization were gradual compared to the cataclysm wrought by EuroAmerican contacts. In contrast to precontact fluctuations, which were mainly dispersions of Tlingit groups—clans or sibs hiving off from established settlements and founding new settlements or new houses in existing settlements—postcontact change has been a process of considerable geographic (but not sociological) consolidation. Instead of kwáan (dwelling area) settlements consisting of one or more winter villages and perhaps a dozen or more seasonal camps, today most kwáans consist of a single permanent town or city and perhaps a few seasonal habitation sites. This geographic consolidation of settlements has had a number of effects, but as far as relations with place are concerned it has often meant that areas peripheral to the present villages are less visited because of the time and costs involved in reaching them. At the same time, sociologically, clans have become more and more dispersed as individual clan members have chosen to settle outside of Know Your Place 37

their traditional villages, particularly in cities, such as Juneau, Ketchikan, Anchorage, Seattle, and beyond. These changes in social geography are part of the wider trend of time-space distanciation discussed in the previous chapter. Whatever the reasons for migrating out of the villages, be it employment, marriage, or services, the effects are the same: people become alienated from their homelands, as direct physical and material ties to place diminish. In addition to changes in settlement patterns, regulatory restrictions on habitation and use of traditional Tlingit country also have attenuated physical and material ties to place. For example, settlement is prohibited on most federal lands, including National Park Service and Tongass National Forest lands, which together make up more than threequarters of the land base in Southeast Alaska. In parks and other restricted areas, hunting, fishing, gathering, and other activities may be limited or banned. These constraints, too, have contributed to the alienation of Tlingits from landscapes they historically inhabited and utilized. The loss of connection to places through dwelling has made it more incumbent on people to continue their identification with lands through symbolic means. Among the most important of these symbolic means, as noted in the previous chapter, are clan at.óow, or “owned things.” At.óow consist of material and symbolic property claimed by the matrilineal clan or house group (a sublineage of the clan) as part of their ancestry, heritage, and destiny (shuká; literally “that which lies before us”).1 This property includes geographic sites, such as salmon streams, halibut banks, shellfish beds, fort sites, and prominent mountains, as well as symbolic capital, such as ceremonial regalia, stories, songs, spirits, and names. As with shuká, there is a collective and individual element to at.óow. Clan and house-group members may share much at.óow (territory, songs, and stories, for example), but within the same lifetime, two individuals never claim exactly the same at.óow (their names, for example, differ). As such, the sum total of a person’s at.óow serves to mark that individual as a distinct member of the community and constitutes a pillar of personal identity. In summing up the foundational role that these possessions play in identity and being, both past and future, one elder simply declared, “Our at.óow are our life” (Emma Marks in Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer 1994:v). The life-sustaining role of material resources, such as productive salmon 38 Know Your Place

streams, is readily apparent, but the importance of the symbolic property in defining one’s existence requires a deeper understanding of the production, meanings, and roles of at.óow in defining the individual’s and the social group’s existence in the world. At.óow are important precisely because they reference and encapsulate key elements of Tlingit social group history. Events, beings, objects, and places typically become at.óow when they are crystallized as encapsulating images—usually in artistic designs—and consecrated through ceremonial use and formal dedication within the context of the ku.éex’ (potlatch or party; literally “to invite”). Only after these representations or simulacrum become publicly invested with meaning and value through ritual is the prerogative of ownership recognized and the status of at.óow achieved. Additionally, in the sacred context of ritual, at.óow become more than mere images or representations. Through mediation in expressive ritual forms such as oratory, song, and dance, at.óow have the power to evoke and make present the spirits of those things they resemble and encapsulate. Another important means by which symbolic connections to place are reproduced is through shagóon. This term, also subsidiary to shuká, may be translated as “heritage” or “destiny,” and it is often used to reference the collective ancestry, history, and geography of a clan. According to de Laguna (1972, 2:813), shagóon means or implies “the destiny of a people (or individual), established in the past by the ancestors and extending to the descendants. It is one way of expressing ‘the way things are.’” The concept is especially important in ritual, where a clan’s history and prerogatives, including territorial rights, are negotiated and validated by the opposite moiety. Shagóon also is embodied in Tlingit naming practices. Clans are named for ancestral territories, and individuals are named after clan ancestors. In these and other ways the concept of shagóon merges place and being. Thus, as one elder put it, “if you sell our land, you sell our ancestors.”2

place and the evolution of tlingit sociopolitical organization The links between the evolution of indigenous political systems and ecological factors of place have long been recognized in anthropology (StewKnow Your Place 39

ard 1955; Service 1962). In the Native North American culture area known as the Northwest Coast, stretching from northern California to the rugged, mountainous coniferous rainforests and archipelagos of Southeast Alaska, researchers have posited a strong correlation between abundant natural resources and complex forms of sociopolitical organization (Kroeber 1939; Drucker 1951, 1983). Ethnologists proposed that large quantities of localized resources, particularly salmon, allowed Northwest Coast societies to support higher populations and sedentism and that this, in turn, led to the development of more complex social and political institutions. These features helped to define the Northwest Coast groups as unique among hunting and gathering peoples. In contrast to many of the world’s foragers, whose politics were characterized by small-scale, flexible, and relatively egalitarian institutions, Northwest Coast groups boasted formal local and regional sociopolitical structures and a high degree of social stratification, including slavery. Yet, while the basic assumption about the relationship between Northwest Coast ecological abundance and sociopolitical complexity is ultimately valid, it does not go very far toward explaining the proximate causes for the evolution of very diverse political systems within the culture area over time. More recently, Northwest Coast scholars have begun to consider these issues in detail, and a range of important socioecological factors have been emphasized as contributing to the unity and diversity of political development among various Northwest groups (see Suttles 1968; Fladmark 1975; Schalk 1977; Richardson 1982; Drucker 1983; Ames 1994; Matson and Coupland 1995; Moss 1998; Thornton 1999b, 2002; Ames and Maschner 1999). Key factors include (1) macro-environmental changes; (2) spatial and temporal variation in resources; (3) increased availability of and reliance on marine resources, especially salmon; (4) the advent of preservation and storage techniques; (5) the production of surpluses for trade; and (6) conflict and stresses related to sedentism, population growth, environmental circumscription, and resource competition. These factors combined in different ways at different times to produce a variety of complex foraging societies on the Northwest Coast. Even within Tlingit country, there are important ecological distinctions that relate to social geography and cultural differentiation. Three important microenvironments comprise Southeast Alaska: the south40 Know Your Place

ern, northern, and Gulf Coast regions. Frederick Sound is the dividing line between the northern and southern regions, while the Gulf Coast commences north of Cross Sound. Frederick Sound also serves as the dividing line for migrating salmon stocks and the availability of important plants, such as red cedar (present in the milder southern region). These ecological regions correlate with important cultural variations, such as the northern and southern dialects of the Tlingit language. A similar gross distinction can be made between the island and mainland environments. The largest mainland rivers, including the Stikine, Taku, Chilkat, and Alsek, supported large multispecies salmon runs and provided access to the interior through the coastal mountain barrier. Accordingly, these rivers played host to large, often more sedentary, population settlements. However, while fish, game, and plants abounded throughout the coast, some resources, such as marine mammals and edible seaweeds, were more plentiful on the islands (and Gulf Coast), while others, such as eulachon, soapberries, and mountain goat, were found almost exclusively on the mainland. These variations in natural resources distribution contributed to cultural differences in production and the establishment of complementary trade networks between various mainland and island Tlingit groups. For example, people from mainland settlements at Chilkoot or Chilkat might trade eulachon oil for herring eggs from the island settlement at Sitka. The same principles provided the impetus for trade with foreign groups in the interior and elsewhere on the Pacific coast. Strictly speaking, then, there is no such thing as a pure aboriginal or “traditional” form of social structure or governance among the Tlingit. Rather, their sociopolitical organization has been evolving continuously over the past five thousand to ten thousand years. What is more, it continues to evolve in response to the current environment, a landscape in which valuable resources are gained not just through the domestic production of natural resources and regional trade and ceremonial networks but also from state and federal governments and participation in the global economy and international social movements. Thus, I have argued elsewhere (Thornton 2002) that the new layers of sociopolitical organization, including Alaska Native Brotherhood and Sisterhood Camps and Grand Camps (founded in 1912), Indian Reorganization Act tribal governments (post-1936), Alaska Native Regional Know Your Place 41

and Village Corporations (a product of the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act), among others, are important evolutionary responses to the political ecology of the modern era and have made an already complex Tlingit social organization even more byzantine. The earliest recorded encounters with the coastal Tlingit occurred in the mid-eighteenth century when Russian and other European explorers began to journey along the northwest coast of America. They were followed by European and American traders, who tended to interact with their Tlingit business partners in relatively instrumental and coequal ways. Until the Russian American Company’s colonization of Sitka in the early nineteenth century, contacts were largely limited to trading encounters. Even so, whites were quick to recognize the complexity of Tlingit social structure, which included nobles or elites (often assumed to be “chiefs”), commoners, and slaves and powerful roles for women (see de Laguna 1983). At the same time, there was a great deal of ethnocentric misrecognition on the part of the newcomers as to the degree of division, relationships, and prerogatives among the various levels of Tlingit sociopolitical organization. Thus, early visitors often erroneously assumed that each Tlingit village had a single, paramount chief rather than a host of clan leaders. At the time of contact there were in fact six major levels of political organization (see table 2.1), which can be ranked from broadest to narrowest as follows: nation (Lingít); moiety (naa, from the term for “clan”); kwáan; clan (naa); house (hít); and person (káa).3 Some might object to “person” being classified as a sociopolitical unit, but considering that persons were ranked within Tlingit society and bestowed with hereditary names and titles of political significance that essentialized and publicized political identity as an element of personhood, it is logical to include it. 1. Nation. Tlingits can be said to have constituted a nation only in the sense of cultural geography. They recognized a certain degree of unity among themselves, including a distinct language (Lingít), lebensraum (Lingít Aaní ), and culture (Lingít Kusteeyí ), but they were not overseen by a single leader or government. Indeed, at the time of contact, Tlingit culture was in a period of northern expansion, and, with few exceptions, villages and social groups were becoming increasingly scattered and fragmented rather than unified. Consider that the village of Yakutat, at the 42 Know Your Place

table 2.1. Tlingit Sociopolitcal Organization (1750–1912)

Level

Sociopolitical Unit

Political Status

No. of Units

1

Nation

Weak political status based primarily on common language and culture

1

2

Moiety

Important for organizing reciprocal exchange in ritual politics

2

3

Kwáan

Weak political status based on common habitation, usually of a single winter village

13–18

4

Clan

Central sociopolitical unit based on matrilineage

70+

5

House

Based originally on the segment of a matrilineage residing in one house

200+

6

Person

Sociopolitical status acquired by birth, but big names/titles also reserved for high born Tlingits who distinguish themselves

10,000+

note: For analysis of seven additional layers added between 1912 and the present, see Thornton (2002).

northern frontier, stood several hundred miles and many days’ canoe journey from Cape Fox, at the southern boundary of Lingít Aaní. Such expansion and distancing favored differentiation over unification. Significantly, there is no generic term for nation in Tlingit, and foreign nations, such as the Tagish, typically were conceptualized as kwáans or clans. 2. Moiety. Moieties formed a vital component of Tlingit identity but played only a minor role in politics and governance. Just as kwáans categorized people as inhabitants of certain regions, moieties (from the French term for “half”) identified Tlingits as members of two major

super matrilineages, Raven (Yéil, also known among interior Tlingits as Crow) or Eagle/Wolf (Ch’áak’/Gooch), under which the approximately seventy major clans were grouped.4 There is evidence to suggest that the moieties evolved from two ancient clans, the Laayineidí of the Raven side and the Shangukeidí of the Wolf side, as the Tlingit, lacking a generic term for moiety, used these clan names to label the two superlineages (Swanton 1908:423; Shotridge 1920; de Laguna 1972, 1:450). Undoubtedly, moieties evolved subsequent to the more basic unit of the clan, probably as the number of clans proliferated and became geographically dispersed in a hodgepodge, and thus more difficult to organize practically and conceptually. While politically weak, moieties were nevertheless important strands that linked and organized members of disparate communities and clans into exogamous, reciprocating “sides” to carry out major production and exchanges through rituals such as potlatches. Although they had the advantage of providing a vast network of relatives, moieties had no singular leaders or governing authority beyond that of their constituent clans. Of all levels of Tlingit social organization, moieties were the least geographic. The Raven/Crow and Eagle/Wolf moieties situate people in an abstract, binary-oppositional genealogical and ritual space, but not a geographic one. In fact the evolution of moieties might be best explained as a tool to overcome or transcend the limitations of geography in order to organize effectively Tlingits dwelling in increasingly dispersed places. 3. Kwáan. Unlike the moiety, the kwáan is quintessentially a unit of social geography. Europeans sometimes mistakenly assumed that Tlingit villages, or kwáans, were governed by autonomous political units like those found in Western towns and villages. And in modern times the federal government has sought to make Tlingits more governable by constituting tribal governments along village-kwáan lines through the Indian Reorganization Act and other measures (Thornton 2002). But historically kwáans were not governed like villages. The term kwáan, derived from the Tlingit verb “to dwell,” simply marks Tlingit individuals as inhabitants of a certain living space consisting of the total lands and waters used and controlled by clans residing in a particular winter village. A list of contemporary and historical Tlingit kwáans can be found in table 2.2. In addition, the term kwáan might be extended to refer44 Know Your Place

table 2.2. Major Kwáans in Tlingit Territory from North to South Kwáan

Translation

Modern Village Area

Galyáx Kwáan

Inhabitants of Galyáx (Kaliakh River) Area

Kaliakh River

Laaxaayík (a.k.a. Yakwdaat ) Kwáan

Inhabitants of the Area with Ice Inside

Yakutat

Gunaaxoo Kwáan

Among the Interior Athabascans

Dry Bay

Jilkaat Kwáan

Inhabitants of the Chilkat River

Klukwan / Chilkat River

Jilkoot Kwáan

Inhabitants of the Chilkoot River Area

Haines / Chilkoot River

Xunaa Káawu (Kwáan)

Inhabitants of the Area under Cover from the North Wind

Hoonah

T’aaku Kwáan

Inhabitants of the Area Where the Geese Flood Into

Juneau / Taku River

Aak’w Kwáan

Inhabitants of Auke Lake Area

Juneau / Auke Bay

S’awdaan Kwáan

Inhabitants of the Dungeness Crab Area

Sumdum / Holkam Bay

Xutsnoowú (a.k.a. Xudzidaa) Kwáan

Inhabitants of the Brown Bear Fort (a.k.a Burned Wood) Area

Angoon

Sheet’ká (a.k.a. Sheey At’iká) Kwáan

Inhabitants of the Oceanside of Shee (Baranof Island)

Sitka

Kéex’ Kwáan

Opening of the Day (Sunlight through Rocky Pass) People

Kake

Kooyu Kwáan

Inhabitants of Kooyu (Going into the Stomach [Tebenkof Bay])

Kuiu Island Tebenkof Bay

Shtax’héen Kwáan

Inhabitants of Shtax’héen (Water Biting Itself [Stikine River]) Area

Wrangell / Stikine River

Taant’a Kwáan

Inhabitants of the Sea Lion [Island] Area

Ketchikan

Takjik’aan Kwáan

Inhabitants of the Takjik’aan [a village] Area

Tuxekan

Hinyaa Kwáan

Inhabitants of the Area across the Water

Klawock

Sanyaa Kwáan

Inhabitants of the Area Secure in Retreat

Saxman

ence a people dwelling beyond the boundaries of Tlingit ethnicity or territory. Thus, white men in Southeast Alaska became known as Gus’k’i Kwáan (People Dwelling at the Base of the Clouds), while the Tagish Athabascans were known as Tagish Kwáan. The term kwáan also was applied to nonhuman beings, including spirits, which were believed to dwell in localized communities in nature. These communities of spirits were referred to as kwáani, always with the possessive suffix i to indicate that they “belong to” (or are “possessed by”) something. Thus the Kóoshdaakaa Kwáani, or spirits of the land-otter men—powerful beings capable of capturing and transforming human beings—were conceived of as dwelling in land-otter-like beings that resided in communities. These communities, in turn, were believed to be centered in certain places, though land-otter men could manifest themselves almost anywhere, particularly in certain socio-environmental contexts, such as a human drowning or premature death due to exposure (cf. de Laguna 1972; Emmons 1991). Like human kwáans, spirit kwáans inhabited both cosmological and social spaces. Interestingly, when referencing human communities, the possessive suffix i is omitted in accordance with Tlingit grammatical rules for embodied entities, such as body parts and kinship terms (Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer 1990:127). This suggests that, unlike noncorporeal objects, which are disembodied and may be possessed or dispossessed, a person’s kwáan, or homeland, is, according to Tlingit ideology, an organic part of his or her makeup and thus inalienable. The linguistic construction mirrors the social reality. Consequently, if a child is born in Sitka and the parents are of clans localized there, that child is forever Sitka Kwáan regardless of where he or she may eventually reside. Like personal and clan names, a person’s residential kwáan is a basic component of his or her identity. Kwáans themselves typically did not act as political entities; unlike Western town and village governments, there were no kwáan councils or assemblies to issue ordinances, mete out punishments, or raise revenues. All of these activities were carried out at the clan level, prior to the reprioritization of the kwáan as a major political entity (i.e., the federally recognized tribe) in the modern American era. 4. Clan. The exogamous, matrilineal clan (also termed sib) is the oldest and most basic unit of Tlingit social structure and the foundation 46 Know Your Place

of both individual and group identity. Tlingits consider a person to be a member of his or her mother’s clan, a child of the father’s clan, and a grandchild of other clans. Traditionally, this identity formed the basis for nearly all forms of social action. Clans or their localized segments, known as house groups, owned and maintained use rights to physical property, including salmon streams, halibut banks, hunting grounds, sealing rocks, berrying grounds, shellfish beds, canoe-landing beaches, and other landmarks, as well as symbolic property, such as names, stories, songs, regalia, crests, and other cultural icons, including clan ancestors. These possessions, or at.óow, comprised the foundation of Tlingit identity, and each clan was conceived of as having not only its exclusive property but also its own unique “personality” and ways of being (de Laguna 1972, 1:451). Virtually all legal and political authority was vested in the clan. Clans or their localized segments, rather than regional “tribes” or kwáans, made war and peace, conducted rituals, and organized material production. Traditionally, in times of conflict, loyalty and “patriotism” were with the clan, a reality that created inherent structural tensions in interclan contexts, such as marriage, residence, and ritual (de Laguna 1983). The centrality of the clan is further reflected in the fact that closely associated foreign groups, like the Haida (Deikinaa, “Way Outside Clan”) and Southern Tutchone Athabascans (Gunanaa, “Interior Clan”), were conceived of as clans. An important but often overlooked aspect of clans is their geographical basis. Two aspects of clan geography are particularly significant: origin and distribution. Origin refers to the location where the clan was founded as a distinct social group and is typically from where it derives its name. The majority of Tlingit clans adopted their names from the geographic areas they inhabited, and the linguistic construction of such clan names invoked a sense of belonging or being possessed by the named place (see table 2.3). For example, Gaanax, the Tlingit name for Port Stewart in Behm Canal, was settled by a Tlingit group who then became the Gaanax.ádi, literally the “beings of” (or “possessed by”) Port Stewart. An offshoot of this group, the Gaanaxteidí, settled at the head of the same bay (Gaanax Tahéen) and later migrated north, eventually establishing the famous Whale House of Chilkat. These origin sites were often taken as crests by the clan and, as such, were considered sacred property (at.óow). Clans not named for natural sites Know Your Place 47

Gaanax ta (Head of Port Stewart) Káach (Little Pybus Bay)

People of Chookanhéeni

Clan of Dagis [a creek]

People of Dakl’eiw

Residents of Deishu[hít]

People of Gaanax

People of Gaanax ta

People of Káach

Chookaneidí

Dagisdinaa

Dakl’aweidí

Deisheetaan

Gaanax.ádi

Gaanaxteidí

Kaach.ádi

Gaanax (Port Stewart)

Deishu[hít] (Angoon)

Dakl’eiw (Sandbar on Stikine River)

Dagis (near Alsek River)

Chookanhéen (Berg Bay / Creek)

Translation

Clan

Place Affiliation (Origin)

Mat

Head of Sheltered [Harbor]

Sheltered [Harbor]

End of the Trail [House]

Back of the Sand

?

Straw Grass Creek

Translation

table 2.3. Some Tlingit Clans Named For Places and Their Distribution

Keex’, Shtax’héen

Jilkaat

Jilkaat, Aak’w, T’aaku, S’awdaan, Taant’a

Xutsnoowú and Interior

Jilkaat, Xutsnoowú, Taant’a, and Interior

Gunaaxoo, Jilkaat, and Interior

Xunaa, Sheet’ká

Kwáan Distribution

Kwáashk’ (Humpback Salmon Creek) L’ukanáx (Deep Bay)

Lukaax (Duncan Canal)

Neix (Naha Bay) S’iknax (Limestone Inlet)

Inhabitants of Kwáashk’

People of L’ukanáx

People of Lukaax

People of the Uppermost Stream

People of Neix

People of S’iknax

People of Shánkw

Kwáashk’i Kwáan

L’uknax.ádi*

Lukaax.ádi

Naanya.aayí

Neix.ádi

S’iknax.ádi

Shangukeidí

Shánkw (Saint Philip Island?)

Tributary to Stikine River

Kiks (Helm Bay)

People of Kiks

Kiks.ádi

Kax’noowú

Charred House People

Kaagwaantaan

Little ?

Whetstone Place?

?

Uppermost Stream

Off the Point

Coho Community

Humpback Salmon (Eyak)

?

Female Grouse Fort

Taant’a, Hinyaa, Kéex’, Jilkóot, Gunaaxoo

Shtax’héen

Sanyaa

Shtax’héen, T’aaku

Jilkóot, Gunaaxoo and Interior

Xunaa, Sheet’ká, Laaxaayík, Gunaaxoo

Galyáx, Laaxaayík

Sanyaa, Sheet’ká, Shtax’héen

Galyáx, Laaxaayík, Xunaa, Jilkaat, Sheet’ká, Gunaaxoo

Sít’koh (Port Snettisham) S’uktuhéen (Big John Creek) Takdeinx’áat’ (Island in Lituya Bay) Taalkw (Thomas Bay)

People of Sít’koh

People of S’uktuhéen

Residents of T’akdeinx’áat

People of Taalkw

People of Tanahéen

People of Teikw

Sit’kweidí

Sukteeneidí

T’akdeintaan*

Taalkweidí

Taneidí

Teikweidí

Teikw (Dall Island?)

Tanahéen (Tunehean Creek)

Skanáx (Saginaw Bay)

People of Skanáx

Skanax.ádi

Place Affiliation (Origin)

Translation

Clan

table 2.3. (continued)

?

Jumping Fish Creek

Basket?

Toward the Side Island

Wide Grass Stream

Glacier Cove

Noisy Beach?

Translation

Taant’a, Sanyaa, Xutsnoowú, Laaxaayík

Shtax’héen, Kéex’

Shtax’héen

Xunaa

Kéex’

S’awdaan, T’aaku

Kéex’

Kwáan Distribution

People of Tukyee

People of Was’héeni Was’héeni (Creek near Hamilton Bay)

‘Those on the Island

People of Yán

Tukyeidí

Was’ineidí

X’at’ka.aayí*

Yanyeidí

Hemlock [House]

Island On

Water Lice [Wéis’] Creek

Outlet of a Lake

Behind the Seal Water

Harbor Seal Ice Floes

T’aaku, and Interior

Xunaa, Gunaaxoo

Keex’

Xutsnoowú, Carcross

T’aaku

Kéex’

note: For source information, see Hope and Thornton 2000:150–51; Emmons 1991; McClellan 1975; and Leer n.d. * All considered to be “Coho Tribe”clans.

People of Yán (a hemlock house built on Taku River)

X’at’ká (Island in Dry Bay)

Tukyee (Mitchell Bay?)

Tsaat’ehéen (Young Bay)

People of Tsaat’ehéen

Tsaat’ineidí

Tsaagwáa (South Arm, Hood Bay)

People of Tsaagwáa

Tsaagweidí

often took their identity from some aspect of the village geography, such as an architectural feature of their clan house (e.g., the Kaagwaantaan, “Charred House People”) or its location within the village (e.g., the Deisheetaan, “End of the Trail House People”). The linguistic homology between clan names and sacred geography served to reinforce strong material, social, and spiritual ties to place among clan members, and the understanding of these ties was considered to be an essential component of one’s heritage and identity (shagóon). The geographic distributions of clans are noteworthy because of their discontinuity in space. Segments of a single clan are typically dispersed in several, often nonadjacent, communities or kwáans. For example, the Shangukeidí are found in the northern kwáans of Jilkóot (Chilkoot) and Gunaaxoo (Dry Bay) and the southernmost kwáans of Taant’a (Tongass) and Hinyaa (Klawock), but nowhere in between except Kéex’ (Kake). This dispersed network of multilocal clans, which evolved through the twin processes of fission and migration (and perhaps confederation in the case of Shangukeidí), contributes to a social geography with its own spatial logic and unity. This logic, in turn, shapes the Tlingit individual’s basic knowledge of physical, social, and historical geography. Thus, through his clan’s oral traditions, a northern Chilkoot Shangukeidí may possess a strong sense of his clan’s historical roots in southern Southeast Alaska, despite the fact that these sites lie hundreds of miles away, and he personally may have never traveled to these places (cf. de Laguna 1972, 1:225–26). Similarly, a Deisheetaan living in the interior of Canada (e.g., Carcross, Tagish, or Teslin) may gain knowledge of her group’s historical ties to the distant island Alaskan village of Angoon, as evidenced in this statement by Carcross-Tagish elder Angela Sidney: One time, long ago, a chief of the Deisheetaan nation [clan]—that’s us— came in from Angoon. That chief’s family sailed up the Chilkat River; they stayed there with the Chilkat people . . . maybe for two months. When they’re going to head back, here that Chilkat chief’s son has fallen in love with that Deisheetaan’s chief’s daughter! Well they got married . . . her children grew up around Taku River. [When they were grown] her three girls married [inland] to Tagish, to Teslin, to Telegraph Creek. It was the women who came up here, who married up here, but it has to 52 Know Your Place

be a man who claims the country. . . . To tell the truth of it, I met someone last summer [1980] from coast people. I told him that I’m Deisheetaan sháa [woman] from Angoon. “Oh my,” he said. “My great-grandmother told me, ‘Two women went that way, inland. Two or three. They got married inland!’ Now I’m glad to meet you.” He shakes hands with me. I know now that coast people are our relations. (In Cruikshank 1990b:37–39)

Because the social body of the clan has ties to certain places, as this example illustrates, so too do its individual members, despite their relocation, segmentation, or other distanciations in space. These multiple ties to place are embodied in the clan’s at.óow and shagóon, including names, ancestors, regalia, songs, stories, and the like. Tlingit history and geography, then, must be read through the clans. The symbolic effects of this linguistic grafting of social bodies onto physical places have a profound influence on the identity of each. In Charles Peirce’s (1960) semiotic terms, each becomes an indexical icon of the other. Every time the clan name is spoken, the geographic associations are invoked in a way that merges the social group with the place. Thus, one cannot speak of the Kiks.ádi without implicitly invoking their ties to Kiks Bay (near the Nass River), the distant place for which they are named. The converse is also true: when the place-name is mentioned, the people and their history are naturally alluded to. These associations remain poignant even after the clan’s place of origin has been abandoned, provided that the clan itself remains a vital social group and continues to maintain its heritage (shagóon). As the clans’ places of birth (or rebirth), these geographic sites are particularly sacrosanct and may serve as crests (at.óow), vital sources of symbolic capital. The formation (or reformation) and naming of a clan is often associated with cataclysmic events in antiquity (cf. Allaire 1984:97). The epic Flood is a case in point. This ancient and catastrophic deluge washed away early Native villages, forcing people to seek refuge in the liminal space of rafts, “stone nests” on mountaintops, and other temporary shelters. When the floodwaters subsided, both the social group and the landscape itself were in a sense reborn. While the events surrounding clan origins date back to time immemorial, clan histories are performed and alluded to again and again in narrative, song, dance, visual art, and other Know Your Place 53

symbolic forms in which the deep and powerful social, emotional, and material ties of specific social groups to specific places are reproduced. Place-names and clan names embody these associations profoundly and succinctly. The linguistic homology between clan and place leads to other metaphoric associations, too. Two images are especially poignant: place/clan as protector and place/clan as provider. Port Stewart (Gaanax, “Sheltered”), is bay recognized and named for its protective capacities to shelter people from wind and weather; likewise, the Gaanax.ádi clan may be conceptualized as a kind of protective container for its individual members. Similarly, in a metaphor of sustenance, the Tsaagweidí can allude to their connection with the key resource, harbor seal (tsaa), found in their place of origin, Hood Bay (Tsaagwáa, “Seal Ice Floes”). Such metaphors are skillfully blended in the context of visual and verbal art.5 Both male and female clan leaders carried special authority and titles and to this day are referred to in Tlingit as Naashádaháni (clan head) and Naa Tláa (clan mother), respectively. Since descent was reckoned through the mother, but males were largely responsible for laying claim to territory and public offices such as hít s’áati (house leader), the mother’s brother, or maternal uncle (káak), played an important role in training her children, the future leaders of the matrilineage. As one Deisheetaan elder put it: “Long time ago the uncles, they used to be responsible for their nephews; they have to train them because the Tlingits believe that a father is not very stern with his own children . . . so his [wife’s] brother is always responsible for training the boys” (Greer 1995:18). Clans also were measured in relation to one another according to their wealth, power, and prestige. In addition to achievement, marriage also could boost a lineage’s status, especially when the father’s clan was of high status and the marriage perpetuated an ancestral pedigree. The status of the father’s clan also could be important in determining individual status and rank, and paternal ties provided knowledge of and access to places controlled by his matrilineal kin. 5. House. As Tlingit society expanded demographically and geographically, clan lineages were aggregated (into the above-mentioned super matrilineages or moieties) and subdivided into localized matrilineages known as houses (hít) or house groups. The Tlingit term hít 54 Know Your Place

refers to the residential houses themselves, which were named for and sheltered members of a matrilineage or sib and their conjugal families. Where clans were small, residing in a single multifamily structure, the clan and house group were effectively the same entity. But a growing population and other pressures naturally led to the formation of new houses and sublineages over time. House leaders carried the title hit s’áati. The Yanyeidí clan’s history illustrates how a house group becomes named and eventually forms a clan. According to Elizabeth Nyman (Nyman and Leer 1993:9–35), a Yanyeidí elder from Atlin, British Columbia, the Yanyeidí took their name from a hemlock tree, which they were cutting down to make a house when their adze broke. At that time, the Taku River was bisected by a glacier, with people living on both sides. Mourning the loss of their adze, the people on the upriver side of the glacier were heard by those on the downriver side, and eventually the two peoples were united when the downriver group crossed the glacier to meet those on the other side. The downriver people also brought with them adzes, and thus the upriver people were able to finish building their hemlock house. “So that we will have a name to be called by, this is Hemlock House” (19), Xuts, the leader of the upriver group, proclaimed. As the lineage expanded, other houses were built, and they became known collectively as the Yanyeidí, or “Hemlock House People,” a clan. House groups had both a physical and a sociopolitical reality. Physically, houses, like clans, were always intimately linked to their birthplace, even if the original house itself was destroyed or relocated. Sociopolitically, a Tlingit was always a part of his or her mother’s house, regardless of where he or she resided; the only exception to this was when a sublineage formally established a new house in the context of a potlatch (Mauss 1967; Kan 1989; Emmons 1991). The house group was also the core unit in the domestic mode of economic production. While the multifamily clan houses have been replaced as physical structures by nuclear family dwellings, the sociopolitical house is still recognized, and matrilineal ties are still reckoned through it. House groups maintain their integrity not only through the framework of kinship and ancestry (shagóon) but also through leadership (hít s’áati), property (at.óow), and coordinated social, ceremonial, and economic activities (kusteeyí ). 6. Person. Finally, at the level of personhood, all Tlingits were Know Your Place 55

bestowed with birth names that were considered at.óow of the house or clan and inherited matrilineally. As components of personhood, names distinguished not only clan/house identity but also hereditary social rank, as the names themselves had different values (Emmons 1991:261). The lowest-ranking members of coastal Tlingit society, slaves (gux), were not always given proper Tlingit names because of their status as property rather than persons within the political system. In contrast, the highranking members of free society, the aanyádi (children of the village), were given the more valuable names at birth. As a consequence, birth names ultimately placed significant constraints on their carriers’ future political status. Below the aanyádi stood the commoners, the largest strata of the social structure, whose names were typically selected by the oldest women or by the clan mother of the mother’s group and ritually bestowed through a potlatch. Angoon Deisheetaan elder Lydia George identified naming as the single most important aspect of cultural training among the Tlingit. “Your name tells you your history . . . who you are and how you are related to people.” At the metaphysical level the Tlingit term for name (saa or ya saa) corresponds with breath (Langdon 2000:149). Names, especially high-status names and titles, were recycled and reanimated through ritual, in which participants were paid by hosts to endow and breathe life into the name by repeating it aloud at least three times as it was invested in the initiate. Without a Tlingit name, social identity is drastically weakened—short of breath—and the individual may be considered adrift, lost, without a spirit, and without a place (l’aan gooshu, “without country”). De Laguna (1972, 2:790) observes, “It is through his name, and the meaning of his name, that a Tlingit knows himself. His name or names identifies the spirit or spirits, formerly animating a long line of forebears, that have come to live again in him, shaping his body or lending character to his personality.”6 The fact that many personal names are directly tied to places of historical significance further strengthens their embrace. A recent birth announcement exemplifies how this connectivity is realized: “On January 18, 2000, Shawaan JacksonGamble was formally given the name Chaak’ti, which translates to ‘Caretaker or Keeper of Hamilton Bay.’ Hamilton Bay is an historically important bay to the Tsagweidí families and is still used today by Kake people for subsistence activities” (in Langdon 2000:154). The embrac56 Know Your Place

ing connectivity of Tlingit names so impressed one observer, he was led to assert: “It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of naming among the Tlingit. In a culture where everything is related to everything else and nothing was spiritually meaningless, names not only classified, they defined social roles, conferred mythic significance, and they were often lovely” (Carpenter 1977:288).7 Traditionally, a person’s clan, moiety, and individual status could be reckoned from his or her name. European naming practices have confused matters. As Deisheetaan Ida Calmagane (Thornton 2004b:39) explains, “The white man came and they just give anybody any name, any kind of name.” In contrast to singular matrilineally inherited Native names, in the nineteenth century Europeans began giving Natives anglicized first and last names, with the surnames being patrilineally inherited, in direct conflict with the aboriginal way. Perhaps in response, some new naming patterns emerged, including the practice of tying a person’s first name (which was not patrilineally inherited) to his or her land. Examples of such naming include Berners Bay Jim, Lituya Bay George, Hot Springs Charlie, Sheep Creek Mary, Situk Harry, and Taku Jim. This pattern of naming provided better resonance of individuals’ ancestral and practical ties to place than the Euro-American way of “giving any kind of name.” Personal status, however, was not solely the product of one’s name, birthright, or ascription. The highest-ranking names of a particular lineage were reserved as titles and were given only to highborn members (or, rarely, to exceptional commoners) who merited chiefly status through their own achievements. These were almost exclusively men whose achievements were measured by their success in organizing economic production, taking care of lands and resources, and expanding the redistribution of goods and sociopolitical alliances through trade, marriages, ritual potlatching, and other means. As elites, these titleholders also controlled clan at.óow, including the distribution of nonmaterial possessions, such as clan histories, songs, stories, names, and other specialized knowledge.8 From the standpoint of Tlingit ethnopsychology, personal wealth, prestige, status, and character were all deeply rooted in place. Accordingly, sacred places constituted a special type of at.óow. In discussing the sacredness of particular legends of the trickster/demiurge Raven that Know Your Place 57

are localized in his clan’s Chilkoot territory around modern-day Haines, the Lukaax.ádi leader Austin Hammond (Daanaawáak; see Kawaky 1981) emphasizes how these at.óow connect place to individual and social being in a life-sustaining nexus: It was at Chilkoot that they [my grandfathers] taught me things about our Tlingit ways. My grandfathers said, “The time will come when these things we’re going to tell will need to be heard again.” I tell you for years and years we found in the river our livelihood and our food, the strength of our families. . . . And all along these shores were special places where the salmon come. And each place has its own name. It was Raven who showed us how to get our food. Raven knew what was good for us, and taught the Tlingit how to live. Raven exists in our legends and in our lives. Sometimes Raven is powerful and wise, and at other times Raven seems foolish. But always the stories of Raven hold special meaning for us. It was Raven who hung by his beak suspended from the clouds at the time of the Great Flood. It was Raven who taught our people to catch salmon. These are the stories my grandfathers passed on to me. These are the things I’m trying to teach my grandchildren. It is these stories which help guide our people as we live with the land. . . . For Raven taught us, if we live with the land, not against it, the land will take care of us. The land, the river, they hear us!

As at.óow, sacred places and the stories they hold are important for the earthly wisdom they embody and the character that they draw forth. As psychologist James Hillman (1999:11) notes, the Greek word mythos is perhaps best translated not as legend but rather as “plot.” “The plots that entangle our souls and draw forth our characters are the great myths,” he observes. “Myths show the imaginative structures inside our messes, and our human characters can locate themselves against the background of the characters of myth.” Places, the settings of myth, give resonance to these plots and make them tangible to the future generations who follow their ancestors’ footsteps, or shuká. Therefore, it is not only that the land and the river “hear” Tlingits but also that Tlingits, through at.óow and other frames, “hear” the lands and waters speak their wisdom and use this guidance to construct personal behavioral 58 Know Your Place

models and meanings (Cruikshank 1990b, 1998), thereby helping them to realize their shuká as both heritage and destiny. How individuals construct these models becomes fundamental to their character. As Hillman also observes, character is more than a set of traits to be identified or instilled: it is a process of self-realization embodying a unique constellation of characteristics or traits that become more clearly inscribed (to use a term etymologically linked to character) on the individual, and thus perceptible as lasting and defining images, only with age and experience. Thus character requires “additional years” and the important physiological and psychological changes that come with aging, in order to be fulfilled.9 At.óow represent this organic relationship between person and place in other ways as well, including mapping the landscape of the world and of history onto the landscape of the body as constitutive elements of personhood. This is done most poignantly through naming and the donning of regalia that clothe the body in clan crests and ornaments, which, in turn, clearly emplace the wearer geographically and socially. According to de Laguna (1972, 2:758), Tlingit personhood may be conceptualized as possessing three aspects: “the body, a virtually sexless, immortal spirit or soul which is reincarnated in a series of bodies . . . and the name or names which indicate and also establish personal identity.” Like clan or house-group identity, names and titles are passed on from generation to generation and may be of geographic origin (see de Laguna 1972, 2:789; Thornton 1997b, 1997c, 2000) or allude to particular landscapes. Such names fuse place and personhood in clear and inextricable ways. Similarly, as at.óow and shagóon, names evoke elements of character. I would argue that bodily at.óow, such as ceremonial headgear, Chilkat blankets, and other regalia, as well as ornamentation such as tattooing, face painting, and the like, effectively constitute a fourth dimension of Tlingit personhood. Through the embodiment of at.óow designs, these adornments literally extend and project the person as a social being. They also reveal social rank. According to Sergei Kan (1989:77–102), the ideal person in Tlingit society is the leader (hít s’áatí, “master of the house”) or “aristocrat” (aankáawu, “person of the village,” or aanyádi, “child of the village”), who is symbolized as being heavy, stationary, and dry like a rock, as opposed to wispy, fleeting, and wet like a leaf. Accordingly, the ideal person is conceptualized as situKnow Your Place 59

ated and emplaced, like a feature of the land itself, but also as “heavy” in adornments and possessions, or at.óow. In fact, the Chilkat and button-style blankets and other regalia that adorn Tlingit leaders are literally heavy, but more important they represent “weighty” and anchoring components of the collective being, including stellar features of the landscape, such as rivers and mountains, which figure prominently in the clan’s shuká. These places are sacred sites for the clan that displays them and are considered possessions (at.óow) through a transaction or “purchase” event (Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer 1994:15), often in which a clan member was “exchanged” (typically involuntarily) for the land. In the film, Haa Shagóon (Kawaky 1981), Lukaax.ádi leader Austin Hammond wears the precious Sockeye Point Robe (X’aakw X’aayí Naaxein; see fig. 2.1) and explains the event it symbolizes and the purpose of its display: Woven into the blanket that I wear is an important legend. Two young boys were racing in their canoe when it capsized. As one boy pulled himself out of the water, up from the lake’s depth appeared a giant sockeye salmon taking hold of the remaining boy, to disappear beneath the waters. And after several days people from both clans gathered there to mourn his loss. It was decided to call the place Sockeye Point [X’aakw X’aayí ]—the name repeated four times to carry the weight of the law and the emblem woven into a blanket. And to those who come asking, “Where is your history?” I answer, “We wear our history.” Traditionally, we have not been writers of books. We did not have surveys or titles. But we wove into our blankets our brother the sockeye. On our clothing is the ownership and history of our land.

By this and other means, at.óow serves to merge place and identity in ways that reinforce social group and geographic affiliations as well as Tlingit notions of personhood, social rank, and resource tenure. As Austin Hammond’s example demonstrates, at.óow also inscribe character and serve as touchstones for character building. In the case of Sockeye Point, the place is the carrier of an important life-sustaining lesson about the dependence of the collective upon the salmon. The sacrifice of one of the clan’s members to the sockeye allows his descendants to continue to harvest salmon in a delicate moral and ecological balance suggestive of mutual respect between equals. 60 Know Your Place

fig. 2.1. Austin Hammond displays the Sockeye Point Robe (X’aakw X’aayí Naaxein), a sacred object (at.óow) of his clan, at a 1981 ceremony near Chilkoot Lake in Haines, Alaska. Among other things, the robe encapsulates important clan history and signifies title to the lands and waters around Chilkoot Lake, where freshwater (spawned-out) sockeye salmon (x’aakw) are harvested. Photo by R. Dauenhauer

the social organization of geographic knowledge Having shown how the basic units of Tlingit social structure relate to one another and to place, I now examine the organization of Tlingit geographic knowledge at the level of the individual in more detail. To do this I return to my ethnogeographic interviews with Herman Kitka Sr., whose place in the social structure is outlined in table 2.4. He is a four-named elder of the Box House of the Kaagwaantaan clan of Eagle moiety, from Sheet’ká Kwáan (i.e., dwelling in Sitka, the anglicized name for Sheet’ká, meaning “Oceanside of Shee [Baranof Island]”). He is a child of the L’uknax.ádi clan. But the birth of the Kaagwaantaan as a clan begins not at Sitka but in Hoonah territory, in the shadow of the present-day Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve (see map 2.1). According to a story told to Know Your Place 61

table 2.4. Tlingit Social Organization, with a Profile of Herman Kitka Sr. Level

Social Unit

Herman Kitka Sr.

1

Nation

Tlingit

2

Moiety

Eagle/Wolf

3

Kwáan

Sheetk’á Kwáan

4

Clan

Kaagwaantaan (L’uknax.ádi Yádi)

5

House

Kook Hít

6

Person (Names[s])

Kusataan, S’áaxw Shan, Naawul’aada, Kindaa

John Swanton (1909:326–46) by Herman Kitka’s great uncle, Deikeenaak’w, it is from a place near Xákwnoowú (Sandbar Fort) in Dundas Bay (Listee) that the proto-Kaagwaantaan hero, Kaakeix’wtí (also known as “the man who killed his sleep”), a Xakwnukweidí (person of the people from Sandbar Fort), struck out on an epic quest to the interior after killing his sleep, which appeared to him in the form of a bird. Looking for seals, he canoed into Cross Sound, moving west toward a place called Nagukhéen (Rolling Creek, a small sockeye system at Cape Spencer). After rounding Cape Spencer (Nagukyada), he headed inland on foot to Mount Fairweather (Tsalxaan, “Land of the Ground Squirrels”) and then returned to the coast, emerging near Lituya Bay at a place called Yakwdeiyí (Canoe Road) near Lak’ásgi X’aayí (Seaweed Point). He continued his journey north to Dry Bay (Gunaaxoo, “Among the Athabascans”) and then navigated up the Alsek (Aalseix’, “[Resting Place?]”) and Copper (Eekhéeni, “Copper River”) rivers to the interior, where he lived among the Athabascans for two years, teaching them how to trap and prepare certain fish and animals efficiently and in quantity. After two years, Kaakeix’wtí packed his belongings and returned with the Athabascans to Glacier Bay. Reentering Tlingit country, they reached the coast at Chookanhéeni (Straw Grass Creek), home of the Chookaneidí (People of Chookanhéeni) clan; but the Chookaneidí shunned the visitors, telling them instead to head across the bay to L’eiwshashakee Áan (Glacial Sand Hill Town) at Bartlett Cove. Here they encountered the group that would become the Kaagwaantaan. After the advance of the glaciers in Glacier Bay (another story; see Dauenhauer 62 Know Your Place

map 2.1. Selected sites in Herman Kitka Sr.’s place-name inventory (Thornton 1997b) 63

and Dauenhauer 1987:245–92), Kaakeix’wtí and his group moved with the Kaagwaantaan to Lulxágu (Fireweed Pebble Beach), where they built several large houses and a fort (Kax’noowú, “Female Grouse Fort”) and sponsored lavish potlatches with their newfound wealth from the interior trade. Timbers for one of these houses were damaged by fire, and, consequently, the dwelling earned the name Kaawagaani Hít, or “Charred House.” It is for this house that the Kaagwaantaan are named. Afterward some of the Kaagwaantaan moved to Sitka. As Deikeenaak’w (Swanton’s consultant [1909:346]) put it, emphasizing ancestral ties to the landscape: “Because we are their descendants we [the Sitka Kaagwaantaan] are here also. They continue to be here because we occupy their places.” As Herman Kitka puts it, working backward, “Some of us came to Sitka, but we all stem from Glacier Bay.” The journey of Kaakeix’wtí is Kaagwaantaan history. Because Herman Kitka draws his identity from these events, he knows this geography, even where he has not set foot in the territory. But the man who killed his sleep is also hero to the L’uknax.ádi, Herman Kitka’s father’s people (see also Swanton 1909:154–65).10 The Kaagwaantaan, it is said, were the wives of the L’uknax.ádi (161) and vice versa. They lived together at Glacier Bay and later at Sitka. The L’uknax.ádi, too, gained wealth through favorable trade with the Athabascans, including native copper through the Copper River trade corridor. According to oral tradition (160), in the spring after they hosted the Athabascans, the L’uknax.ádi traveled to the mouth of the Copper River (Eekhéeni), where they established a village, Kus’eixka. Swanton’s other consultant, Kadashan, notes: “All along where they went they gave names. A certain creek was called [Nagukhéen (Rolling Water, at Cape Spencer)], and they came to a lake which they named [Ltu.áa (Inside the Point Lake, Lituya Bay)]” (160). Also named were the two tallest mountains of northern Southeast Alaska: Mount Fairweather (Tsalxaan, “Land of the Ground Squirrels”) and Mount Saint Elias (Waa’eit’ashaa, “Mountain Inland of Waas’ei Yík” [known in English as Icy Bay]). Because Herman Kitka’s father was L’uknax.ádi, with ties to the famous Dry Bay village of Gus’eix, where the first Sleep House was built in honor of these events, he also knows these places from the stories told by his paternal relatives. Although Kaawagaani Hít and Kax’noowú have long been aban64 Know Your Place

doned, they remain sacred. As sacred places, they are remembered, honored, and frequently utilized as potent symbols to achieve important social objectives. In potlatches and other ceremonies in northern Tlingit country, Kaagwaantaan orators still use the phrase Ch’a Tleix’ Kax’nuwkweidí (We who are still one People of Grouse Fort) to achieve at least three ends: (1) to promote solidarity and communitas among the now dispersed Kax’noowú clans; (2) to reiterate their inextricable ties to this historic, collective dwelling place; and (3) to metaphorically transport the listeners to this sacred landscape so that they may be reunited with their ancestors, who likewise may be summoned forth by name.11 In short, Kax’noowú serves not only as a chronotope, a place where time and space merge and cannot be understood without reference to each other, but also as a place that is “brought forth to reconfirm” (gágiwdul.aat; cf. Nyman and Leer 1993) shagóon, Tlingit being in the world. The Coho clans possess their own phrase of sociogeographic solidarity: Ch’a Tleix’ L’uknax.ádi (We who are still one People of L’ukanax). The original L’ukanax (literally Coho Community) may have been at Deep Bay in Peril Strait north of Sitka, where Herman Kitka maintains his father’s subsistence camp to this day (cf. de Laguna 1972, 1:226). Mr. Kitka can trace his family’s presence there back at least eight generations. In oratory, the phrase Tleix’ L’uknax.ádi is also used to refer to Dundas Bay, Lituya Bay, and Dry Bay on the west coast of Glacier Bay National Park. Dry Bay and Lituya Bay are famous as birthplaces of new Coho clans. As one L’uknax.ádi, the late Paul Henry, remarked, “From Lituya Bay we migrated away from each other.” He added jokingly, “Maybe we kicked each other out of there” (Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer 1981:52a), an acknowledgment of the main motivation for clan fission among the Tlingit: conflict. Lituya Bay is especially rich with place-names and cultural associations and is homeland to the T’akdeintaan branch of the Coho clan, which stems from the L’uknax.ádi. Similarly, Herman Kitka noted in our interviews that “Dundas Bay has a lot of history.” Among other things, it is celebrated as the site of the original two-story clan house (Eagles Nest House), what he jokingly terms “the first Tlingit condominium.” Occasionally, the phrase Ch’a Tleix’ Xakwnukeidí (We who are still one People of Xakwnoowú) Know Your Place 65

is also used in oratory to the same effect as the Kaagwaantaan phrase. Like Kax’noowú, Xakwnoowú is a very old site; material recently excavated at the fort site suggests occupation dating as far back as sixty-five hundred years.12 It is primarily through these interwoven social histories and the wellsprings of at.óow and shagóon that Herman Kitka has come to know the sacred geography of his clan and that of his father’s people. Place intelligence comprises both traditional ecological knowledge (tek) and traditional social knowledge (tsk), and both are necessary for success in Tlingit country. tek provides the individual with a foundation to comprehend and adapt to local ecological conditions. tsk provides the individual with a foundation to comprehend how people have evolved in relation to the land and to one another.

conclusion There are two important geographies in Tlingit: the physical and the social. The basis of claims to ownership and use of territory and resources was founded in knowledge of both geographies and their interrelationship. Tlingit place-names were an important link between the two landscapes and formed an important basis for social identity and the maintenance and transcendence of sociogeographic boundaries. Strategically deployed in rituals and other communicative interactions, placenames and their cultural associations function not only to distinguish groups but also to unite them. Toponyms embody both ecological and sociological knowledge, and Tlingits learn to think with the landscape to achieve a variety of material and social goals. Unfortunately, those who do not speak Tlingit—that is, nearly all those under age seventy— have a much more difficult time achieving these goals because the implicit connections between personhood and geography are absent or obscured in English. Similarly, many non-Native observers have missed these connections and oversimplified Tlingit geography as neatly bounded clan or kwáan territories, when the reality was much more dynamic and complex. Tlingits who do understand the connections between person, social structure, and place through traditional ecological and sociological 66 Know Your Place

knowledge have a powerful technology at their disposal. It is something akin to a modern geographic positioning system, except that it is more adaptive because it is coordinates one’s position along the physical, ecological, and sociological terrains. With this knowledge one can reckon not only one’s place on the map but also one’s place and ties in the multidimensional social structure that defines and governs that landscape, even if it is not the domain of one’s own clan or kwáan. With this technology one can find an answer not only to the question, Where am I? but also to the equally critical question in Tlingit, How do I belong to this place? This is why on a recent berry-picking trip to Glacier Bay National Park, Herman Kitka began thinking about place-names and about his relatives, maternal and paternal, who lived and subsisted in this part of Huna Tlingit country. At a memorial plaque in Dundas Bay honoring his dad’s nephew, he and members of the Chookaneidí and T’akdeintaan (the Coho clan, once a house group of the L’uknax.ádi) clans stopped to pay their respects and to recall their many relatives and ancestors who had dwelled in this sacred place. Turning to the younger leader of the T’akdeintaan clan, the recognized owners of Dundas Bay, Herman Kitka invoked the words of one of the man’s maternal uncles, who had said to him, upon meeting the Kitka’s boat anchored at Dundas Bay more than a half century ago, “You belong here 100 percent.” “He knew I had Coho on both my father’s and my mother’s [mother’s father’s] side of the family,” Mr. Kitka remarked with a smile, remembering the warm feeling of being “placed” and embraced by the web of Tlingit social relations. “That’s right,” his T’akdeintaan host replied, renewing the embrace with a link of his own: “You’re my dad’s people” (i.e., Kaagwaantaan). And with that all commenced picking neigóon berries, united again in the shadow of Xakwnoowú.

Know Your Place 67

3 what’s in a name? Place and Cognition

Ever since I was a boy I have heard the names of different points, bays, islands, mountains, places where [we] get herring, [hunt] and make camps, that is why I think this country belongs to us. —kadashan, tlingit leader

“Dzántik’i Héeni is hard to spell. . . . It’s impossible to pronounce . . . sounds like Santa’s Bikini! . . . And who wants to be a flounder!” These were some of the protests heard in 1994 in response to a proposal to name a new middle school in Alaska’s capital, Juneau, after the Tlingit name for the city’s downtown water source: Dzántik’i Héeni (Flounder at the Base of the Creek), known as Gold Creek in English. Many citizens favored other contending names for the new school, most of which were biographical names, honorifics to immortalize worthy individuals, among them a Tlingit civil rights leader, Elizabeth Peratrovich. But influential members of the Native community pressed the issue as a means of affirming not only the increasingly threatened Tlingit language and geographic identity (despite a growing non-Native population, Juneau is still a Tlingit community) but also Tlingit ways of place naming, which are richly descriptive and seldom biographical. Despite its phonological, orthographic, and semantic problems for English speakers, Dzántik’i Héeni prevailed as the name for the new middle school and paved the way for a renaissance of Tlingit place naming. It is tempting to dismiss the charges against Dzántik’i Héeni as mere cultural insensitivity. After all, a number of the Russian and Spanish names that dot Southeast Alaska are also difficult for English speakers to pronounce. But there is more to it than this. Because it is a descriptive place-name, Dzántik’i Héeni, as a symbol, presents certain prob68

lems when translated into English and applied to a new locale. The new middle school is not at the mouth of Gold Creek (indeed, some local Natives preferred the Tlingit name for the school’s actual locale, Shaanáx Tlein, or “Big Valley”), and in transferring the name one cannot avoid also transferring its other symbolic links. Thus, “gathering flounder” may come to be associated with children gathering on the grounds of the new school. Interestingly, flounder, a perfectly respectable creature and subsistence resource in Tlingit culture, suffers from a sullied image in English. Few students want to be thought of as “floundering.” Consequently, the gathering of flounder, a cause for celebration in Tlingit culture, becomes a dubious metaphor for contemporary English-speaking middle school children in the mostly non-Native city of Juneau. Such is the power of names as symbols and ways of knowing places in diverse cultures. This chapter analyzes Tlingit place-names both as a universal domain of human knowledge and as a particular cultural system of meanings.1 Unlike Dzántik’i Héeni Middle School, most indigenous place-names have arisen out of organic processes of experience rather than bureaucratic processes involving nominations, committee meetings, and votes. I begin by mapping a cognitive terrain defined by a set of Tlingit placenames arising through organic experiences described in the well-known Tlingit “Salmon Boy” myth. I show how this myth defines, connects, and frames certain named sites in time and space, and coordinates with the knowledge and experience of contemporary Sitka elders who still inhabit this storied landscape. Then I move on to address four key cognitive questions using a linguistically informed anthropology of experience: (1) How are Tlingit place-names constructed syntactically, and how does syntax relate to Tlingit environmental perception? (2) What is named, and how does the distribution of indigenous place-names reflect patterns of movement, settlement, and subsistence? (3) What are the major semantic components of Tlingit toponyms, and how do they compare to the English toponomy in defining places? (4) Pragmatically, how are place-names deployed and interpreted within the broader context of Tlingit cultural genres and systems of meaning? Overall, my objective is to go beyond a mere descriptive listing and translating of toponyms, as is so often the custom with place-name studies, and to analyze them in a framework that allows for cross-cultural comparisons What’s in a Name? 69

and insights into how Tlingits in particular, and humans in general, conceptualize their relationship to the lands they inhabit. The Tlingit language has certain structural and relational capacities that enable a speaker to communicate an enormous amount of information about the qualities of a place within a single toponym—information that would be burdensome if not impossible to express in an English placename. By contrasting the structure of Tlingit place-names with English toponyms in a single area, Glacier Bay National Park, one sees that there are important similarities and differences in place-naming patterns across cultures. I argue that similarities in place-naming patterns may be linked to certain cognitive universals, such as the use of the body and kinship as metaphors, whereas differences in naming are illustrative of key differences in perceptions of and attitudes toward the environment. After fleshing out these differences and similarities, in the final section of the chapter I relate these findings to Tlingit cultural ideals of place naming and relational ecology as expressed by the Tlingit cultural hero and place maker par excellence: Yéil (Raven)

the map is not the territory but a cognitive terrain Mapping names on a two-dimensional grid consisting of longitude and latitude is itself a cultural act of representation, and it should be emphasized that, as the linguist Alfred Korzybski said, “the map is not the territory” (see Bateson 1979:32; Hunn 1996:6). Indeed, all maps are representations and distortions, if not “lies” (cf. Monmonier 1991). As has been shown, Tlingits had their own ways of mapping territory, especially through sacred property (at.óow), such as ceremonial regalia, which too might be “mapped” onto the body as an element of personhood. In my research I found that, while many Tlingits were comfortable working with official paper maps, especially fisherman and hunters, who often scrutinize topographical maps and nautical charts, others preferred being there, or, when that was not possible, orienting themselves and the audience on an imaginary journey and pointing to named features of the invisible landscape in the air as we “approached” them. Beyond awareness of cultural differences in mapping, it is important 70 What’s in a Name?

to recognize that there has been a history of intercultural mapping between Tlingits and Euro-Americans. Perhaps the earliest and most unique mapping experiment involving Tlingit place-names was that of George Davidson (1901), who set out in 1869 to map the lands above the Chilkat River extending to the Yukon River, which had previously been terra incognita to Euro-American cartographers. He enlisted the help of the Gaanaxteidí leader Kohklux (also known as Chatrich’), whom he reportedly had to bail out of jail to employ in this endeavor. In an inspiring exercise in cross-cultural communication, Davidson engaged the Chilkat leader to work with paper and pencil for several days creating a map of this area. As Davidson tells it, the endeavor “cost him [Kohklux] and his two wives two or three days’ labor with pencil and no rubber. . . . It began at Point Seduction, in Lynn Canal, with islands, streams and lakes; and with mountains in profile” (76). To this Kohklux added information about distance (in terms of days’ travel by foot), camping places, and geographic names. Needless to say, Davidson was quite impressed. For his part, Kohklux was equally impressed with Davidson’s ability to transcribe Tlingit sounds on paper such that the geographer could read Native place-names back to him in his own Tlingit tongue. Fortunately, this exemplary piece of collaborative research was recorded and can be used by Chilkat and Chilkoot Tlingits and interior groups as a source of aboriginal place-names, historic trails, trade routes, and other valuable information.2 Another explorer who was sensitive to indigenous names on the land was Edward J. Glave, who accompanied the Frank Leslie Exploring Expedition to the Yukon interior in 1890. Reporting on the local geography, he wrote: Throughout my letter I have retained the native names of geographical points wherever I could learn them. In my opinion, this should always be studied. The Indian names of the mountains, lakes and rivers are natural land marks for the traveler [sic], whoever he may be; to destroy these by substituting words of a foreign tongue is to destroy the natural guides. You ask for some point and mention its native name; your Indian guide will take you there. Ask for the same place in your substituted English and you will not be understood. Travelling in Alaska [sic] has already sufficient difficulties, and they should not be increased by changing all the picturesque Indian names. Another

What’s in a Name? 71

very good reason why these names should be preserved is that some tradition of tribal importance is always connected with them. These people have no written language, but the retention of their native names is an excellent medium through which to learn their history. (In Cruikshank 1991:113)

Glave (1890:86) was especially impressed with another Chilkat Tlingit leader, Indiank’ (Indayaneik), who was “proud of his geographical knowledge and takes great delight in imparting to us items of information. . . . His map [rendered in the sand], when complete, generally covers a space five or six yards square.” Unfortunately, other explorers were anxious to ignore or remove the Native names in favor of their own monikers of discovery. The explorer and travel writer Eliza R. Scidmore early on condemned this form of cultural erasure, chastising the unfortunate tendency of Euro-Americans to ignore the indigenous geographic nomenclature in favor of giving landmarks “the name of some inconsequent and now forgotten statesman whom it seemed officially desirable to flatter at the time” (1896:143). As a result, only a fraction of the total inventory of Tlingit placenames survives today. Even without problems of cultural erasure, language loss, and colonial renaming, aboriginal place-names are fragile linguistic artifacts. Unlike other domains of knowledge, such as terms for plants and animals or body parts, place-names are not necessarily widely shared. Though key landmarks may be known region-wide, names for other geographic landmarks may be restricted to those who have material or social ties to them, as emphasized in the previous chapter. Even the most knowledgeable of elders knows only a subset (as discussed below, usually no more than about five hundred) of the total inventory of Tlingit place-names. Unfortunately, for many Tlingit clans and house groups, the last surviving elders with traditional geographic knowledge of particular lands have passed away. As much as 50 percent of Tlingit toponymic knowledge may be lost already, and this loss could accelerate as Tlingit becomes increasingly endangered as a spoken language. At present, fewer than five hundred Tlingits, mainly the eldest generation, speak their native tongue fluently, and, even for them, it is typically not their dominant mode of discourse (see Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer 1998). Place is 72 What’s in a Name?

increasingly crystallized through the English language and the EuroAmerican place-names that dominate the landscape. The implications of this linguistic shift (and loss) are profound. As the last Tlingit-speaking elders from particular landowning groups die, so too do many of the names, metaphors, narratives, and other knowledge related to specific places within these areas. Even when language revitalization is successful, ethnotoponymic knowledge may not be recovered. As one elder lamented: “I used to know the Tlingit names of these places, but now I don’t remember them all. . . . [And] there’s no one left to ask.” Such realizations have spurred efforts to conserve the Tlingit place-names, following Linnaeus’s dictum that, “if you don’t know the names, your knowledge of things perishes.” Adapting Linnaeus to a Tlingit proverb, T’akteintaan elder Ken Grant states, “Lyee sakoowoo saawx’ ch’a tleix ee jeedax goox la haash ee koosteeyi” (If you don’t know the names, your [Tlingit] way of life will drift away forever) (see hia 2006). Many Tlingit-speaking elders have taken this proverb to heart. Indeed, given the selective forces working against them, it is amazing how many Native place-names elders do remember. Often they remain sedimented in the mind, below the surface of conscious recall, only to be stirred up into memory in certain experiential and cultural contexts that connect to them. A number of times during fieldwork I was fortunate to be able to re-elicit an aboriginal name from an old map, chart, or report. “Oh yeah, I remember that one—that’s a good one!” elders would often exclaim upon hearing the name again: “—[a relative] used to talk about that place.” Inevitably this would lead to further reminiscences on the social history of named places, as elders began to connect geographic names to one another and to people in storylines of individual and collective experience. Such storylines ultimately weave together into maps of experience and configurations of shagóon, which, in resonance and interanimation with the canonical myths and sacred clan histories and geographies (and other at.óow), help Tlingits make sense of the world and their place in it. This is why, having heard the names and knowing their webs of significance, Kadashan can assert with confidence that “this country belongs to us.”3 To illustrate the process of how place-names and personal and canonical storylines intermesh and interanimate one another, I map a version of the Tlingit “Salmon Boy” myth in relation to modern Tlingit expeWhat’s in a Name? 73

riences. Widely distributed among peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, the myth concerns a boy’s capture and yearlong odyssey among the salmon people before returning to his people and becoming a powerful shaman. The oldest written version of the story, recorded by John Swanton (1909:301–10) from Deikeenaak’w in Sitka in 1904, is also the richest in toponyms. In April 2000 I had the opportunity to map this story with Sitka elders Herman Kitka and Ethel Makinen, Roby Littlefield, and Sitka Tribe staff, as part of an effort to retranscribe and retranslate the story part for a place-based school curriculum (see Littlefield et al. 2003). We went over the story line by line in both English and Tlingit, with a special eye toward identifying and “getting the story behind” named sites in the text. The results highlight not only the resonance between place-names, memory, and experience but also how an ethnogeographical reading of myth can enrich the understanding of indigenous peoples’ sense of place and the links between language, land, and identity. The story map (map 3.1) charts eleven place-names in the order of their appearance in Deikeenaak’w’s version of the story. Deikeenaak’w was a Kaagwaantaan granduncle of Herman Kitka and a child of the Kiks.ádi, the matrilineal clan most closely tied to the story. Though Deikeenaak’w died when Herman Kitka was young, Mr. Kitka heard the story from elders numerous times. Moreover, as a lifelong commercial and subsistence fisherman in the Sitka area, he was intimately familiar with its geographical and ecological context. Deikeenaak’w assumed that his audience possessed this background knowledge and could actively apply it in interpreting the story, including the specific geographic locales he names or alludes to in passing. This is precisely what Herman Kitka and Ethel Makinen did, adding at least six additional important geographic sites (nos. 12–17) that are indirectly referenced in Deikeenaak’w’s narrative. Our discussion of the story began with the title. Swanton chose to call the story “Moldy-End,” after the unflattering name given to the boy protagonist by the salmon people, whom he insulted by disparaging and casting aside a moldy piece of dryfish offered him by his mother. The proper Tlingit title for the story, the elders agreed, should be Aak’wtaatseen (Alive in the Eddy), the honorific that was bestowed on the boy after he returned from his year with the salmon tribe and 74 What’s in a Name?

map 3.1. Story map of the Aak’wtaatseen “Salmon Boy” myth. Cartography by Barry Levely.

became a shaman. Significantly, Aak’wtaatseen also embodies a geographic reference, for when the boy returned to his people after having been transformed into a salmon, he chose to seek out his mother in an estuary, or eddy, at the mouth of the stream, where he attracted her attention by behaving in an especially “lively” manner. Hence, the name ties person to place directly. The first place-name mentioned in the story, Daxéit (Fallen Stunned, no. 1), is an important bay, Nakwasina Sound, where the Kiks.ádi maintained a large seasonal salmon fishing camp. According to Herman Kitka, this name comes from another piece of oral history, alluded to by Deikeenaak’w, in which a group of Kiks.ádi explorers came down the Nakwasina River (Daxéit Héen, no. 12) on a raft (Taan Xaanás, “Sea Lion Raft”) and were submerged in the rapids at Keis.axji Héen (Noisy Waterfall, no. 9), save for one man who grabbed a tree branch and pulled himself to safety. The survivor reported back to his relatives that the others had perished, but in fact they had simply “fallen stunned” (i.e., had the wind knocked out of them) and been washed downstream. From this event the name Daxéit emerged. The raft too washed downstream and into Nakwasina Sound, where it became the reef known as Taan Xaanás Eejí (Sea Lion Raft Reef, no. 13), an important navigational landmark today. The second place-name refers to the creek where Aak’wtaatseen was taken by the salmon people after he insulted them. Kaa Tú Kaxsake Héen (Peaceful River, no. 2; translated by Swanton as “Amusement Creek”) is a name that did not appear in our original place-names survey, perhaps because it is used exclusively by the salmon people in what appears to their boy captive as “the far out land.” Interestingly, however, it appears that Kaa Tú Kaxsake Héen is actually part of the Daxéit watershed. Herman Kitka identified the creek as a small narrow tributary of Daxéit Héen, where “it is fun” to catch fish (in summer) because the river runs narrow and clear and “it is easy to pick the fish you want” to harvest. Thus, Tlingits commonly refer to it as Kaa Toowuk Sigoowu Héen (Amusement Creek). By comparison, from the perspective of the boy who is captured by anadromous salmon in summer and reborn as a young, downstream-bound salmon the following spring, ready to embark on his journey to “the far out land” of the ocean, the creek does become peaceful. Looking downstream toward Daxéit in spring76 What’s in a Name?

time, the busy Tlingit fishing community lies dormant, the people having left their smokehouses for the winter village, and the salmon boy sees only birdlife, especially sandhill cranes and brants. After they migrate to sea and spend one or more winters feeding in the ocean, the salmon people return to their natal stream to spawn (at varying times according to species, with coho salmon the last because, as the story relates, they have “holes in their canoes”). The third placename in the story is a passing reference to a shallow saltwater strait (séet), through which the salmon must pass on their return to Daxéit. Here the salmon are buffeted by strong, shifting tides and sometimes scrape against the rocks and become scarred. Herman Kitka identifies this site as Xukxu Séet (Going Dry Strait, no. 3), a long channel that often goes dry at low tide and in which he has seen salmon struggle, scrape, and sometimes become scarred or trapped. This also occurs in other salmon passes, including Neva Strait (Eey Xéidáxaa Séet, “Tide Rips Strait,” no. 14) and Olga Strait (Aan Niyaadéi.aa Séet, “Closer Strait,” no. 15). Next the salmon go ashore at a place where “it appeared like they would throw hot rocks on each other” and where “the skin of some of them moved like fish skins being roasted on hot rocks” (Littlefield et al. 2003). According to Herman Kitka, this is a reference to the Tooch’ Héen Tlein (Big Fish Roasting Creek, no. 16), another Tlingit fishing camp on a creek in Neva Strait, where salmon collected were caught and roasted over a fire on special flat roasting sticks. Farther along their journey back to Daxéit, the salmon people encounter the herring people, who also return en masse to spawn in Sitka Sound each spring. Natural rivals (salmon eat herring), the two species engage each other and trade insults. The salmon tribe taunts, “If only your cheek meat [which herring lack] satisfied people’s hunger.” The herring tribe responds, “We fed them before you” (herring spawn earlier than salmon spawn). “Our eggs are our cheek meat” (Tlingits prize herring eggs). “Maybe now your backbone will get dirty” (a reference to the fact that while herring spawn and live to see another day, salmon spawn and immediately begin to decompose, beginning along the backbone) (Littlefield et al. 2003). In addition to clarifying the ecological context of these insults, Herman Kitka notes that the site of this encounter was likely by Tan (Jumping [Fish], no. 17), an island in Sitka Sound where herring collect in great numbers and may appear to What’s in a Name? 77

the incoming salmon like “a cloud far down the horizon,” as the story relates. As they approach Daxéit from Sitka Sound, the salmon people divide and choose their destinations. The pink (humpback) salmon say they will be going to X’as’tuhéen (Saliva Creek, no. 4). “That’s what the humpy [humpback salmon] people call it,” Herman Kitka observes. Elaborating, he explains that the choicest parts of the spawning rivers are taken by other salmon species, so the “humpies” chose to spawn in the lower reaches of the streams, where the tidal action and foam give the water a saliva-like appearance. The name poses a metaphoric analogy between the mouth of the river and a being’s mouth. Aak’wtaatseen, a dog (chum) salmon, is destined for the upper reaches of Daxéit Héen. He follows a path the salmon tribe calls Wat Aan Aayí (Right to Town, no. 5), referring to the Tlingit settlement at the mouth of the Nakwasina River. Just before reaching the village, they encounter Yoo Luklihashgi X’aa (Floating Point, no. 6), from whence they can see the Tlingit smokehouses, which at first appear to them like forts. Optical illusion is also significant in Tlingit perceptions of this point. Herman Kitka relates that if the point appears to be floating when you approach it on a sunny day, it is a sign rain will come the next day. Tlingits used Yoo Luklihashgi X’aa as a means of forecasting weather. The next named place on their journey is Tlaganís Luká (Sapling Point, no. 7), where the people gathered and sharpened the green saplings “so the fish would jump on them.” This is another name that may belong exclusively to the salmon people. The point lies at the mouth of the Nakwasina River. Once inside this point the boy sees his father, and the salmon encourage him to “stand up,” meaning to jump for him. This Aak’wtaatseen does, impressing his mother especially. Later, after the other harvested salmon are half-dried, he eagerly presents himself to her in the eddy (the event from which Aak’wtaatseen’s name, Alive in the Eddy, is derived), where she is cleaning fish. The salmon boy is then gaffed and clubbed by his father and given to his mother for cleaning. She is unable to make the first cut to clean him, however, because the salmon boy’s neck is protected by the same copper choker he wore as a child. Examining the fish closely, Aak’wtaatseen’s parents discover the copper necklace and realize their son has returned. They proceed 78 What’s in a Name?

to put him in a finely woven basket (léet’), cover him with bird down, and place him on the roof of the smokehouse and perform a ceremony to restore the salmon boy to human form. The remainder of the Aak’wtaatseen story is a shamanic sequence, detailing the transformation of the salmon boy back into human form, after which he becomes a powerful shaman and leader among the Kiks.ádi people. Aak’wtaatseen’s shamanic activities produce their own unique landscape and a set of toponyms chronicling his exploits. The small pond near Daxéit, where Aak’wtaatseen bathes and drums for power, becomes Xijaa.eix’i (Beating Time Slough, no. 8); the place where he spears the powerful land otter becomes Yuxakaanáx At Yoo Duguk (Point It [the Spear] was Thrown Across, no. 10); and the place where the shaman cuts out the otter’s tongue and fasts for eight days takes the name Wóoshdáx Awlixeeji Yé (the Place Divided, no. 11). So powerful was Aak’wtaatseen that “he lived for more than 100 years. Even as he was dying, his spirits were so strong, that he sat and they moved him in a circle in a trance” (Swanton 1909:310; Littlefield et al. 2003). Aak’wtaatseen is still remembered for the lessons he teaches about Tlingits’ moral and ecological relationships with the salmon people, for the way he followed the salmon and learned to see the world from their point of view, and for the powerful shaman he became upon his return from the oceans. Up until the late nineteenth century, when missionaries and the state undertook to actively suppress it, shamanism was a powerful institution throughout the Northwest Coast. Shamans distinguished themselves through their extraordinary abilities to sense places and communicate with and control the sentient constituents of the landscape, sometimes even transforming into nonhuman beings, like salmon, to experience the world from their sensory perspective. Hence shamanism was a powerful technology for understanding and negotiating (and even transcending) local landscapes. So, too, is fishing experience a powerful technology, as evidenced by the deep ecological reading Herman Kitka is able to give to the salmon boy story. Having engaged the salmon in the same places, his experience resonates with events in the story. To become a good fisherman, he says, not unlike Aak’wtaatseen, “you have to make a study” of the salmon. This involves not only observing salmon but also learning to think and sense like a salmon—to develop an appreciation of their worldview. What’s in a Name? 79

The story of Aak’wtaatseen can be read in many ways. In this brief ethnogeographic mapping of one old version of the story, I have emphasized the abundance of traditional ecological and toponymic knowledge that is embedded in the myth and how an understanding of the plot and setting is enlivened and enriched by contemporary elders who still possess such knowledge. Only those with such expertise can comprehend the ethnogeographical and ethnoecological “grammar” that underlies the salmon boy’s adventures and gives order and meaning to the particular constellation of named places that constitute the story’s dynamic and sentient setting.

how are names put together? the syntactic structure of tlingit toponyms How naming systems develop is a function of language, culture, and environment. Cognitive anthropological and linguistic research has shown convincingly that, while language and culture are not so arbitrary as to actually constitute the environment, as the extreme form of the Sapir-Whorf, or linguistic relativity, hypothesis suggests, they do play a powerful role in shaping perceptions of the landscape (cf. Lakoff 1987). Thus, cultures inhabiting the same terrain may conceive of and act on the environment in very different ways. Tlingit is classified as an isolate in the Na-Dene language family first proposed by Edward Sapir (1915) and consists of four mutually intelligible dialects or speech areas: the Gulf Coast, Inland, Northern, and Southern (de Laguna 1972, 1:15–16). Like Athabascan languages, Tlingit is characterized by its grammatical emphasis on the verb and its complex prefixing and classificatory structures that allow whole phrases to be built out of a single verb stem. Typically the verb stem appears toward the end of a word, with as many as twelve prefixes and three suffixes modifying it. Important prefixes for place naming include relational nouns or theme prefixes (Naish and Story 1973), directionals, classifiers, and possessives. Commenting on the possessive suffix in place naming, Ken Grant instructed me that it reflects the Tlingit notion that places, like human beings, can “possess things,” even people. Indeed, Tlingits respect lands, as they do people, for what they possess. 80 What’s in a Name?

In a verb-centered language like Tlingit, place-names may incorporate complex verb phrases that have the capacity to define the environment in terms of its actions, motion, and processes. This linguistic emphasis on action is mirrored in Tlingit metaphysics in that actions are attributed not only to what English speakers would define as “animate” objects or beings but also to inanimate ones, such as rocks and trees, and indeed the earth itself (de Laguna 1972, 1:21). In addition to this “enlivening” influence of the Tlingit verb, the Tlingit system of incorporating relational nouns and other specifiers into the verb enables the speaker to describe complex actions with a precision and economy that is hard to match in English. To understand how this works, one can take as an example the English and Tlingit names for Glacier Bay, which, although similar in their geographic referents, convey different meanings. The English name, Glacier Bay, is a classic binomial compound, consisting of a generic physical feature of the landscape (bay) with a specifier, in this case a noun (glacier), preceding it. Many English place names conform to this pattern. The Tlingit toponym Sít’ Eeti Geeyi (Bay Taking the Place of the Glacier) also is typical in its construction. Like the English, the Tlingit includes the generic (geeyí, or “bay”), but the specifier is not an adjective or a noun, as is commonplace in English; rather it is a relational verbal noun (eeti) implying action in time (“taking the place of”) and relative location. This place-name illustrates well the capacity of the Tlingit toponyms to concisely communicate a complex phenomenon. Even more intriguing than its grammatical construction, however, is the idea that the Tlingit toponym conveys. It is fundamentally ecological in that it relates the way the bay and the glacier interact. While the English name implies only the presence of glaciers, the Tlingit name denotes a geographic process of glacial recession and the consequent formation of a bay in its place. Unlike the English name, the Tlingit toponym clues into important geological and hydrographic events that have occurred in this place. Furthermore, the Tlingit name is both phenomenal and historical in revealing how Tlingits have experienced the changing landscape over time. The indigenous names for Johns Hopkins Inlet, Tsalxaan T’éidí Wool’éex’i Yé (Inlet That Moves toward behind Mount Fairweather), and Hugh Miller Inlet, Anaxkuyaawal’ix’i Yé (Where the Glacier Ice Broke Through), are other examples of this kind of action-oriented naming, What’s in a Name? 81

describing a process that has occurred, or is occurring, over time. The first name requires a seven-word English phrase to translate it. The key to ecological, action-oriented naming is the Tlingit verb. Analyzing the last two Tlingit place-names one finds that they are specific forms of the verb stems “to move” and “to break.” In Tlingit there are more than twenty ways to say “move” or “break” in a complex verb.4 Examples from Constance Naish and Gillian Story (1973:134–38, 34–35) include the following: • move along (a number of objects all together and not having their own power of motion): ka-ya-soos • move along: ya-gaas’ • move along, be moved along: li-gaas’ • move through the air (especially in a downward curve, like an arrow or shooting star): ya-li-gaas’ • move, often imperceptibly; move (of event): ka-di-yaa • move forward with considerable momentum, keep moving from momentum: k’a-ya-ya-daax • move (of textile [or skinlike object]), move around: ya-wook • move heavy object a little at a time (first one end and then the other): ya-li-t’aak

Similarly for the verb “to break” one finds a wide variety of specific forms, including the following examples: • break across (especially long objects), often by bending: li-l’eex’ • break in pieces, crumble: ka-ya-x’eil • break, snap (especially ropelike objects): (1) ya-k’oots; (2) li-k’oots • break off pieces (of food) with hand: ya-waal’

Why are such subtle distinctions worth making? Again, the answer lies in the ecology of Tlingit language. Distinctions within the verb tend to highlight phenomenal “differences that make a difference.” For example, the verb ya-waal’ (to break off pieces with hand) is inherently relational; it speaks of how something breaks in relation to the human hand. The verb denotes an action that can be done only by human hands, without special tools or superhuman force. Especially for hunter-gatherers, 82 What’s in a Name?

who were consistently engaged in harvesting, processing, transporting, and otherwise handling materials with their hands, such distinctions are worth noting. Other verb-centered names encapsulate salient messages about perception of the land, such as Yoo Luklihashgi X’aa (Floating Point); or travel, as in the cautionary name Tleilkee Ya (Place You Can’t Go Through); or subsistence, as in the name Xaataadugich Yé (Pitching the Fish Place). As these examples illustrate, when incorporated into placenames, verbs provide the interpreter with valuable qualitative information about the nature of landscapes. The relational capacity of Tlingit makes it especially well suited to describing the world in ecological terms. Another key to the descriptive power of Tlingit toponyms lies in the fact that multiple relational nouns and directionals can be incorporated or “stacked” into place-name syntax to describe position and location with phenomenal precision. The place-name Geesh K’ishuwanyee (Just on the Edge of the Base of the Kelp) exemplifies this polysynthetic or “stacking” quality of Tlingit by accommodating no fewer than four relational nouns to indicate a specific place in the sea where halibut can be located and caught. Literally translated the name can be deconstructed as follows: Geesh (kelp) K’i (base) -shu (end) -wan (edge) -yee (place below). Relational nouns commonly incorporated into place-names are well suited to describing conditions on both land and sea (see table 3.1). English place-names typically lack such expressive power because relational terms cannot easily be incorporated into their syntax. Like English, Tlingit makes frequent use of binomial compounds in which a descriptive modifier is combined with a geographical generic. Some commonly incorporated generic terms for geographic features are listed in table 3.2. Eugene Hunn (1996) reports an aversion to binomial compounds in Sahaptin place naming, which he cautiously attributes to the “agglutinative nature” of Sahaptin and a general bias against binomials in hunter-gatherer semantic domains (C. Brown 1985; Hunn and French 1984; but see Berlin 1992:275–90). Tlingit, Dena’ina Athabascan (see Kari 1989), and other Na-Dene languages do not share this aversion to binomial compounds or generics. In fact in Tlingit place-names that lack generics there are typically major landmarks, such as prominent mountains like Mount Fairweather (Tsalxaan) or major mainland rivers such as the Alsek (Aalséix), Chilkat ( Jilkaat), Taku (T’aaku), and Nass (Naas), though not Stikine (Shtax’héen). A similar pattern is apparent What’s in a Name? 83

table 3.1. Common Relational Nouns Found in Tlingit Place-Names Relational Noun

Translation

Example

Translation

a daa

around or about it

Taas’ Daa

Double-Headed Tide Around It (Lemesurier Island)

a t’áak

back inland from it

Saaxw T’áak

Back Inland from the Cockles

a k’í

at the base or foot of it

Dzántik’i Héeni

Flounder at the Base of the Creek

a t’éik

behind it

Tayx’ayí T’eikgeeyí

Bay behind Tayx’ayi

a seiyi

below it

Neixinté Seiyí

Below the Green Rock

a t’aak

beside/inside it

Yat’akhéen

Creek beside / inside the Face of It

a x’áak

between them

Tsaa Takdi X’áak

Between Seal Harpooners

a wán

edge of it

Wanachích

Edge of a Porpoise (an island)

a yá

front of it

Gil’ Yaká

In Front of the Cliff

a shá

at its head

Taan Shaayí

At the Head of the Sea Lion

a xoo

amid, among

X’áat’x’i Xoo

Among the Islands

a x’é

its mouth

Yéil X’ek’

Raven’s Little Mouth

a ká (shakée)

on top of it (on top of the hill or mountain)

L’eiw Shaa Shakee.aan

Town on top of the Sand Hill

a t’iká

out toward the open sea from it

Sheey At’iká (Sheet’ká)

Oceanside of Shee (Baranof Island)

a eetí

place where it was Sít’ Eeti Geeyí (or taking the place of)

Bay in Place of the Glacier

in northern Athabascan languages, suggesting a possible refinement of the binomial aversion theory in these areas.5 Among the most important theme prefixes in Tlingit place-names are body referents. As noted earlier, the body is an important metaphor and man’s most basic environment. Thus, like many languages, Tlingit makes use of classifiers that describe environmental phenomena in relation to human anatomy. In his Grammatical Notes on the Language of the Tlingit Indians, Franz Boas (1917:68–70) observed that body referents constituted the majority of modal prefixes that occupy first, second, or third positions of the verb complex. When incorporated into nouns, he notes, the meaning of these body prefixes can be instrumental, directive, or locative (68), as in the place-name Ltu.áa (Inside the Nostril Lake). When body parts are incorporated into verbs, they may represent qualities of

table 3.2. Common Geographical Generics in Tlingit Place-Names Feature

Tlingit generic

Example

Translation

bay

geey

Xóots Geeyí

Brown Bear Bay

cliff

gíl’

Kuts’een Gil’x’i

Rat Cliff

fortified place

noow

Deikee Noow

Far Out Fort

glacial silt, sand

l’eiw

L’eiw Shaayí

Glacier Silt Mountains (cutbanks)

glacier

sít’

Sít’k’i T’ooch’

Little Black Glacier

hill

gooch

X’aan Goojí

Fire Hill

hole

tuwool

Yéilchuwatuli Yé

Raven Bored a Hole There

hole (below freshwater)

ísh

hole (below saltwater)

eet

Chaatl Eedi

Halibut Hole

island

x’áat’

Kóoshdaakaa X’áat’i

Land-Otter Man Island

isthmus, portage

góon

Aangóon

Isthmus Town

Ishkahít

House on Top of the Fishhole

85

table 3.2. (continued) Feature

Tlingit generic

Example

Translation

lake

áa

Áak’w

Little Lake

mountain

shaa

Nuskw Shaayí

Wolverine Mountain

point

x’aa

Teey X’aayí

Yellow Cedar Point

rapids

eey

Eey Tlein

Big Rapids

reef

eech

Yées’ Eejí

Large-Mussel Reef

river, creek

héen

Tilhéeni

Dog Salmon Creek

rock

té

Teyeiyí

Rocks Alongside

rockslide

kaadí

Káa Tlénx’i Kaadí

Slide of the Big Men

sandbar

xákw

Xakwnoowú

Sandbar Fort

spring (freshwater)

goon

Tinaa Gooní

Copper Shield Spring

strait, channel

séedi

Taan Té Séet

Sea Lion Rock Strait

trail, road

dei

Deishú

End of the Trail

valley

shaanáx

S’eek Shaanáx

Black Bear Valley

village, settlement, land

aan

Kasa.aan

Beautiful Town (Kasaan, AK)

appearance or character “in the sense that these qualities are permanent” (112). This pattern is illustrated by the name Yoo Luklihashgi X’aa (Floating Point [Point that Moved Up and Down in a Perching/Squatting Posture]), which refers to a point of land that appears to move up and down like a person alternating perching and squatting. Many place-names use common anatomical prefixes, including the mouth (x’é), face (yá), head (shá), nose (lu), or nostril (lutú). Data on the frequency of anatomical referents in place-names are given in table 3.3. Similar patterns are evident in other Native American languages (cf. Boas 1934:14–18), as well as in English (e.g., Hilton Head), suggesting that anatomical image 86 What’s in a Name?

table 3.3. Semantic Referents in Place-Names

Semantic Category

% Tlingit Toponyms in Glacier Bay (n = 130)

Biological

43

9

30

Animal

29

6

23

Plant

12

1

8

59

25

41

Hydrographic

42

11

32

Terrestrial

16

13

9

Biographical

1

50

1

Habitation Sites

12

0

14

Historical

13

9

7

Metaphor

7

1

6

7

1

4

NA

NA

2

Navigational

NA

NA

1

Subsistence Activity

NA

NA

2

Relationals

NA

NA

13

Topographical

Anatomical Other

% English Toponyms in Glacier Bay (n = 205)

% Native Toponyms in Southeast Alaska (n = 2186)

schemata are a cross-cultural phenomenon in place naming.6 As the primary landscape that humans inhabit, the body provides the most natural “technology” by which to measure and conceptualize the broader landscape. In short, we all have embodied minds (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991).

what is named: semantics and toponymic density Like material artifacts, place-names lie in particular contexts and assemblages, and their distribution and patterning are important to What’s in a Name? 87

understand. Examining what features of the environment are distinguished and labeled by place-names enables one to assess basic issues of environmental perception and classification as well as environmental change and land use over time. As might be expected, many similar geographic features tend to be named across cultures, although not with the same frequency. In oral cultures, a “mental economy” (Hunn 1996) seems to exist, whereby not every landscape feature is named, but rather only those worth remembering. To label all features, regardless of cultural interest, would be both superfluous and taxing on memory. In contrast, in literate societies blank spaces on the map seem to stimulate the naming impulse and the map itself is an aid to memory. Nevertheless, it is clear that certain environmental forms invite names across cultures. These include large persistent geographic features such as large rivers, islands, mountains, and valleys. In an earlier study (Thornton 1995), I charted the correspondence between named features in English and Tlingit for the same landscape, Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve (see table 3.4). The survey showed that, although most types of geographic features were named in both nomenclatures, each culture favored certain categories. For example, English favored the naming of mountains (25 percent of the sample, compared to 5 percent in the Tlingit name set) and glaciers (18 percent vs. 5 percent) while Tlingit emphasized the naming of islands (13 percent vs. 9 percent in the English sample), bays (20 percent in both), streams (19 percent vs. 8 percent), and habitation sites (12 percent vs. none). By comparison, points (8 percent), rocks (3 percent), and valleys (1 percent) comprised roughly the same proportion of each name set. Like English, Tlingit has generic terms for these features. This comparison suggests that perceptual salience by itself does not guarantee that a place will be named. In theory, the number of perceptually salient features is infinite. Thus a selection process is called into play as a basis for making meaningful distinctions in the environment. Tlingits tend to name only specific features of interest to them— for example, refuges, key navigational landmarks, and productive hunting, fishing, and gathering locales—while the places in between remain a “relatively undifferentiated landscape” (de Laguna 1960:20). Especially among societies without written records, where names and 88 What’s in a Name?

table 3.4. What Is Named

Geographical Feature

% Tlingit Toponyms in Glacier Bay (n = 130)

% English Toponyms in Glacier Bay (n = 205)

% Native Toponyms in Southeast Alaska (n = 2,186)

Streams

19

8

24

Habitation sites

12

0

14

8

8

14

Bays

20

20

12

Islands

13

9

8

Lakes / lagoons

2

4

7

Rocks

3

3

5

Passages / straits

3

1

4

NA

NA

4

Cliffs

2

0

3

Glaciers

5

18

3

Mountains

5

25

3

Valleys

1

1

2

NA

NA

2

Caves

0

0

1

Slides

2

0

1

Holes

NA

NA

1

Points

Sand / beach

Tide / current

other knowledge were passed down through oral tradition, cultural interests influenced not only the selection of sites to be named but also whether or not the names were to be retained in the collective memory. Cultural interests in place naming play a similar kind of practical or “utilitarian” role to those shaping ethnobiological classification systems (Hunn 1982). Cultural interests may differ, however, even among cultures inhabiting the same or similar environments. Glacier Bay, being a wilderness What’s in a Name? 89

park in the American consciousness rather than a place of human dwelling, does not inspire habitation names. It does for Huna Tlingits, however, who refer to Glacier Bay as “our homeland” and “our icebox” (Thornton 1999b; Hunn et al. 2003). As befits a maritime culture, hydrographic and shoreline features figure more prominently than inland landmarks in the Tlingit toponymy, while mountains are relatively neglected (see table 3.3). Bays, streams, and islands are the geographic features most frequently named. Although most of these features also have English names, collectively they constitute a smaller percentage of the English name set. For Tlingits, bays and streams had cultural value not only as outstanding geographical landmarks but also as subsistence resource areas and habitation sites. As elsewhere, in Glacier Bay localized Tlingit clans laid exclusive claim to wealthy, defensible pockets of natural resources, especially salmon fishing streams. Berg Creek, or Chookanhéeni (Straw Grass Creek), is a case in point. A productive sockeye and coho fishery and sheltered habitation site, this area was claimed by the Chookaneidí clan. The Chookaneidí not only occupied and possessed this bay but also took their name from it. The name Kuyeik.ádi, belonging to a now extinct segment of the Lukaax.ádi, can be translated as “People of Excursion Inlet.”7 A group called the T’ikanaa (People of the Pacific Side) at one time may have occupied Taylor Bay (T’ikaa) and parts of the outer coast. And finally, the T’akdeintaan, a clan still well represented in Hoonah, apparently took their name from a small island in Lituya Bay upon which they used to camp. In addition to clans, individuals too were named for places. In this way place-names were inextricably linked to identity, property, and other important aspects of social life. These links were sanctified and reinforced in ritual. Only members of the possessing clan were free to interpret the geography and history—including the toponymy—of a territory, which they did through oratory, songs, dances, and regalia and other visual art, as well as through the very act of place naming. What is and is not named may also be a function of the evolution of the landscape itself. For example, in Glacier Bay patterns of glacial advance and retreat have had a profound impact on the distribution of names. Mapping named sites shows a significantly higher density of names near the mouth of the bay than at the present head of the bay, 90 What’s in a Name?

which was inaccessible one hundred years ago. Tlingit oral history and the western scientific literature both highlight the significant glacial recession that has occurred in the bay over the past several centuries. The Tlingit traditional narratives also note the rapid advance of a single, large glacier to the mouth of the bay prior to the modern glacial retreat, an advance that destroyed their main settlement at Bartlett Cove, L’eiwshaa Shakee Aan (Town on Top of the [Glacial] Sand Dune). Prior to this encroachment, Glacier Bay possessed a different name, S’e Shuyee, or “Drainage at the End of the Glacial Mud.” Tlingit history traces this earlier reference to a time when the bay was “a great valley” with a single, muddy river flowing through it (Hall 1962:41). Thus S’e Shuyee and L’eiwshaa Shakee Aan, despite perceptual obsolescence, are retained in the assemblage of geographic names at Glacier Bay. What is more, by unpacking the sequence of names an important insight is gained into the natural history and cultural evolution of the region. Beyond Glacier Bay, throughout the Southeast Alaska region, similar patterns are found, as summarized in table 3.4. Again waterways dominate the name set. Perhaps the most striking difference between the regional name set and the Glacier Bay inventory is the higher ratio of stream names to bay names. This is likely a function of there being many more streams than bays. It is probably true that every major bay and inlet in Southeast Alaska had a Native name, for even those bays that did not possess resources of value to Tlingits held significance as navigational landmarks. This is not the case with streams, however, as there are simply too many to mark with names; nor do all streams possess the navigational salience of bays. In addition to looking at what is and is not named, the density of names in a particular area can also be measured. As with material artifacts, a high density of names on the land implies a strong cultural interest in the landscape and, potentially, a dense population. Toponymic density is a measure of the number of named places per square mile within the range of a speech community. It is derived from the broader concept of lexical density, which Hunn (1994:81) defines as “the ratio of the number of named elements within a semantic domain or subdomain to the size of the referential space spanned by the terminological set.” In the case of place-names, such a measure is designed to facilitate cross-cultural comparisons in naming patterns relative to physical What’s in a Name? 91

space. But, theoretically, lexical density can be applied to terms in any referential space, including color space (e.g., Berlin and Kay 1969; Kay and McDaniel 1978), genealogical space (Atkins 1973), and other semantic spaces. After plotting toponymic densities for Sahaptin-speaking peoples of the Columbia River region, Hunn compared these figures to toponymic and population densities of ten other hunter-gatherer groups, including the Tlingit (based on the author’s data), and one horticulturalist society. He found striking correlations between population densities and lexical densities, which he attributes to the “Magic Number 500.” It appears that few individuals remember more than about five hundred names in any lexical domain. Similarly, the Magic Number 500 also seems to define the upper limits of personal relationships that individuals can maintain in foraging societies, as first suggested by Joseph Birdsell (1953) in his concept of the “dialectical tribe.” Thus, “the strong positive correlation . . . between population density and toponymic density may be understood as the consequence of a domain size-limitation imposed by the constraints of individual human memory” (Hunn 1994:85). A basic analysis of Tlingit kwáan toponymic densities can be calculated by dividing the total number of toponyms in a kwáan by the kwáan’s population density (population divided by kwáan area).8 These calculations show that toponymic densities generally decrease as one moves from south to north, with the southernmost Sanyaa Kwáan and Taant’a Kwáan having the highest place-name densities and the northernmost Yakutat the lowest. Although the earliest and most comprehensive place-name surveys were completed in the southern kwáans, I suspect that the higher densities are also a function of historic population densities and migration trends. The earliest Tlingit population centers were in the southern mainland kwáans, and it is from these areas that many of the northern groups migrated. Thus, the highest toponymic densities would be expected in southern Tlingit country. The Tlingit data also support the Magic Number 500 as a limitation on individual memory. Thomas Waterman’s (n.d.) richly dense toponymic survey of over 850 Tlingit place-names in Sanyaa and Tongass kwáans was carried out primarily with two consultants, although exactly how many names came from each is not known. Similarly, Sitka interviews 92 What’s in a Name?

with elders Charlie Joseph Sr. and Herman Kitka Sr. produced between four hundred and five hundred place-names from each. This is not to suggest that the informants did not know or would not recognize more Native names (and most of the English name set that overlays them), but rather that they these four hundred to five hundred names were the ones they could recall from memory and had some knowledge about in their cognitive “files.”

what’s in a name? semantic referents Analysis of the linguistic structure and topographical distribution of place-names provides a partial view of how cultures perceive their environment. A semantic analysis helps to complete the picture by tracing out other references contained in toponyms besides generic topographical features. Semantic patterns are especially important in evaluating place-names as sources of tek, or traditional ecological knowledge, for they communicate much about why people are interested in particular environmental features. Like the syntactic construction of names, a semantic analysis highlights the descriptive force of Tlingit names in constructing mental images and cognitive maps of a particular geographic region and the inhabitants who have dwelled there. The typology in table 3.3, based on those developed by Waterman (1922) and Hunn (1996), provides a basis for comparing semantic referents in Tlingit and English place-names in Glacier Bay National Park. As in the case of geographic referents, the Tlingit semantics can be compared to the analysis of the regional place-name data for Tlingit. The first category, biological references, includes animals, plants, and anatomical and mythological allusions. In Glacier Bay, animals are evident in 29 percent of Tlingit place-names, referring to twelve different species of fish and wildlife. In English, animals are evoked in 6 percent of names, referring to ten different species of wildlife but no fish. The majority of these associations in both languages are metonymic, meaning that these places are characterized by the presence of a particular resource (ordinarily plant or animal), usually in abundance. For example, Goose Cove was a name suggested by the scientist W. S. Cooper, who observed there “a number of young wild geese, who still unable What’s in a Name? 93

to fly, were flapping over the water” (Orth 1971:379). References to human populations are also included in this category. The English name Tlingit Point is a metonymic association referring to Hoonah seal hunters who camped there. Similarly, the Tlingit called Tidal Inlet Gus’k’iyee Kwáan Geeyí (White Man’s [People Dwelling at the Base of the Clouds] Bay) because of the presence of whites at that place. The Tlingit names for Bartlett River, Gaat Héeni (Sockeye Creek), and for Beartrack River, Gaat Héeni Tlein (Big Sockeye Creek), reflect not only the concentration of this species at these locations but also the Tlingit cultural interest in these fish. Indeed, sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) were among the most coveted of resources because of their attributes as a food source (taste, high oil content, and extended harvestability in freshwater) and their narrow distribution compared to other salmon (cf. Langdon 1989:306; Thornton, Schroeder, and Bosworth 1990). Consequently, sockeye streams were highly valued, carefully guarded, and often named for this key resource. In comparison, the lack of references to fish in the English name set is indicative of a bias toward upland resources, especially those that are easily viewed. In the regional name set, there is a negative correlation between the frequency of fish streams containing various salmon and their semantic frequency in place-names (see table 3.5). Pink salmon streams, the most frequent type, are least commonly referred to in toponyms, while sockeye streams, the least common (along with king salmon and steelhead streams), are the most recognized. As the most common and least desirable of the major Pacific salmon, it seems that pinks were recognized in names only if there was something otherwise exceptional about their run, such as size, timing, quality, or exclusivity. King salmon, the most desirable of the species along with sockeye, are also commonly referred to in names. With respect to the other two species, dog salmon and coho salmon, it appears that a key factor in their being semantically incorporated into names was their temporal existence vis-à-vis other salmon. In streams where they coexist with other salmon, dogs or cohos are often the last species to return in the summer or fall. Late salmon runs were of great value because they supplied a concentrated source of fresh fish when other summer resources were becoming increasing scarce. The primacy of other key foods, such as harbor seals, is similarly reflected in a high frequency of semantic references in place-names. 94 What’s in a Name?

table 3.5. Semantic Frequency of Selected Subsistence Resources in Toponyms Animal Salmon

Percent Toponyms 3

% Salmon Names

Red

1

43

Coho

1

21

King

0

13

Dog

0

14

Pink

0

14

Other

0

7

Halibut

1

Marine Mammals

5

% Marine Mammals Names

Harbor seals

2

56

Sea lions

1

28

Sea otters

1

16

Whales

1

38

Land Mammals

1

Deer

0

Bears

1

Birds

4

Raven

3

Seagull

1

Duck

0

What’s in a Name? 95

Metonymy also characterizes plant references in both languages. In the English toponymy for Glacier Bay, Strawberry Island is an example of a metonymic plant association based on abundance. Chookanhéeni (Straw Grass Creek), Keishish.aní (Alder Country), and Wudzidugu Geeyí (Bay Wooded with Cottonwoods) are examples of this pattern in Tlingit. Interestingly, one Tlingit name for Strawberry Island was L’eiw X’áat’i, or Sand Island, indicative of the island’s habitat at an earlier stage of succession, prior to the presence of significant patches of strawberries. The relative dearth of plant names in both toponymies may be a reflection of glacial scouring and the lack of culturally significant plants (despite a superabundance of berries; see Thornton 1999b) in Glacier Bay as compared to other habitats. Although 12 percent of the Tlingit place-names reference plants, many of these are redundant (table 3.3). Analysis of the regional Tlingit place-name data shows reference to a much wider array of plants than in Glacier Bay, although the frequency of plant place-names is roughly the same (8 percent). Common plants cited include various berries, roots, seaweeds, yellow cedar bark, and other edible plants, as well as those that are employed in technologies, such as yew wood (used for bows and other tools, and found only in parts of southern Tlingit land), saplings, spruce roots, and red and yellow cedar. Here are a few place-names: Kaltl’àak’wach’ Shis’k (Having Fresh Wild Rhubarb), Laxx’áat’ak’u (Red Cedar Islet), Kalsaksk’i (Little One That Has Yews), Kóox X’áat’i (Wild Rice Island), Yaana.eit Xágu (Wild Celery Sandbar), Taganis (Sapling [Poles]), and Xaat Áa Duls’el’ Yé (Place Where They Dig Spruce Roots). Animal references are more common than plants but also comprise a smaller portion of the regional name set (23 percent) than in Glacier Bay. Humans subsist not only on plants and animals but also on minerals and water. The last two categories also manifest themselves in names. One inlet, for example, is simply known as “Grindstone” for the value of the materials gathered there in manufacturing and sharpening tools. Despite the plethora of creeks and rivers, especially good sources of drinking water are referenced often in names, such as Gunhéeni (Clear Springwater) and Tinaa Gooní, (Copper Shield Springwater). In another case it appears that the absence of freshwater is highlighted in a placename that is freely translated as “Where the Saltwater Comes Up and 96 What’s in a Name?

People Moan for Freshwater.” Thus toponyms are named not only for their manifest characteristics but also for their latent or anomalous qualities, or those that they fail to manifest. Another important set of references found in place-names concerns the body. As suggested above, anatomical references are common in place naming as in other referencing systems because of the primacy of the body as man’s most basic landscape and instrument of measure. Placenames such as Yáay Sháak’ú (Whale’s Little Head [Point Carolus]) display a metaphoric association, positing an analogy between a geographic feature and an anatomical feature based on visual resemblance. Even generic topographical references may be couched in terms of the body. In Tlingit a word often used to describe a point of land is lutú, which means nose or nostril, as in Ltu.áa (Inside the Nostril Lake), or Lituya Bay in English. Body references characterize 7 percent of the Tlingit placenames in Glacier Bay. Anatomical metaphors are also invoked in the English toponymy (e.g., Dicks Arm), but less frequently. At the regional level, roughly 4 percent of place-names utilize anatomical references, or what George Lakoff (1987:271) calls “kinesthetic image schemas.” In examining this category of associations, certain patterns of naming emerge that are consistent with larger cultural themes concerning the body noted by other researchers (cf. de Laguna 1972; Kan 1989). These include a marked preference for naming places after external bodily features, as opposed to internal ones; a particular emphasis on the head, face, or specific facial features; and a general avoidance of the mention of bodily effluvia.9 Among the external features of the body, the head, face, and specific facial features are stressed. This pattern is quite consistent with the Tlingit emphasis in other spheres, such as visual art. According to de Laguna (1972, 2:761): “The head or face was the most important motif in art. This not only represented the actual head of a person or animal, but when repeated on other parts of the animal’s body signified the indwelling anthropomorphic soul (qwani [kwáani]). Faces or heads were also used to symbolize the spirits of mountains, rivers, glaciers, rocks, raindrops or hailstones and other entities which we conceive as wholly inanimate objects or natural forces.” It is not surprising that references are found, for example, to Human Head Island (Kasha X’áat’) and to the heads of other beings, such as Shála Xeishk’w (Head like [That of What’s in a Name? 97

a] Steller’s Jay), referring to a mountain with a crestlike ridge. Similarly, other topographical features are linked to specific parts of the head, including the face, nose, mouth, and jaw. De Laguna (1954) also emphasizes the potency associated with bodily effluvia. Perhaps because of this potency, few direct references to bodily effluvia are found in place-names. Yet external orifices of the body, such as the mouth (Taay X’é, “Hot Springs Mouth”), nostrils (Ichlugè “Inside the Nose Reef”), and rectum (Xalnù Tukyee, “Below the Anus of Xalnú”), through which these substances pass, are commonly referred to in place-names. As in the body (see Walens 1981), landscape “orifices” often link one domain with another, such as the “mouth” connecting a bay to a strait or an underground spring to a surface pool. In addition to the above naming patterns involving parts of bodies, there are also metaphoric references in toponyms to whole forms, human (Tsaagwáa Shaanák’u, “[Hood Bay] Old Woman”—a mountain; or Nás’gináx Kaa, “Three Men”—islands) and nonhuman (Yáay, “Whale”—an island). As a schema, anatomy provides a tool for organizing disparate geographic elements into meaningful wholes. The importance of metaphorical and metonymic association in naming and of image schemata like the body in classifying the environment helps explain redundancy in naming. Northwest Coast ethnogeographer Thomas Waterman (1922) correctly observed that indigenous naming principles bred certain patterns of replication, wherein similar sites in different areas would inspire the same name. Even so, the logic of repetition involves more than unreflectively applying old names to new sites that resemble the originals. Like naming offspring after ancestors, naming places after similar predecessors involves a certain contemplation and comprehension of their character. Perhaps for the same reason, the geographies of mythic stories are often relocalized when groups move to a new setting. There is an important mitigating factor, too: distance. In general, features with the same name cannot be too close together. Thus not found are two creeks named Gaat Héeni (Sockeye Creek) in the same area. The logic of this rule would seem to be one of avoiding confusion in identifying key sites in practical navigation and in memory. Significantly, this pattern applies to the social world as well, where it is important that persons possessing the same name (especially honorific names and titles) not be too close together in social 98 What’s in a Name?

space (e.g., within the same localized house group) and time (e.g., the same generation), lest there be confusion. There is another process that I term ensemblage, which also has been reductively characterized as mere redundancy by early ethnographers. A geographic ensemblage is a grouping and relating of various landscape features into a meaningful whole through naming. Ensemblage creates regions out of otherwise disparate points. Typically one key landmark serves as the central organizing feature for a whole constellation of named sites within a circumscribed area. For example, there is a small island called Kéin at the entrance to the narrows above the village of Kake in central Southeast Alaska. Kéin (an unanalyzable term) is the central organizing feature for a geographic ensemblage that also includes Kéin Séet (Kéin Strait/Pass, east of Kéin) and Kéin Yatx’i (Children of Kéin, a set of islands southwest of Kéin). Although small and seemingly insignificant in itself, Kéin is a very important landmark for orienting travelers approaching and leaving Kake to the northeast. Its significance as a signpost is cross-cultural, as underscored by the fact that the island, known as Turnabout Island in English, now houses a federal navigational marker for boats. But in the English toponymy there is no ensemblage— the subsidiary features of the island are not even named. Larger toponymic ensemblages in Tlingit may contain as many as ten or twelve names related to a central feature. The Kéin grouping is one of two ensemblages at the entrance to Keku Strait. The other one—the Teik ensemblage—orients the traveler approaching or leaving Kake to the northwest. Like Kéin, Teik is a small island, but in this case its derivative names refer to features on the island itself and are anatomical in nature, Teik Lunáak referring to the “nose” or point of the island, and Teik Tukyee to its “rear end” or outlet. The metaphor of kinship offers another schema for relating places. Especially common is the “child of” metaphor, which defines a small feature proximal to its larger “parent”; Kéin Yatx’i (Children of Kéin) is an example of this paradigm. Such ensemblages and schemata both reveal and shape Tlingit sensuous perceptions of the landscape, rendering the character of their country in human terms. Not far from Kéin is a place called Kéex’ Luwoolk’í, or “Hole at the Base of the Nose [Rock] of Kake” (i.e., “Little Nostrils of Kake”) (see fig. 3.1). Kake Tlingit dancers used to adorn themselves with large nose rings to emulate the shape of What’s in a Name? 99

fig. 3.1. Kéex’ Luwoolk’í (“Little Nostrils of Kake”) is a descriptive name using anatomical metaphor to characterize this historic village site first settled by the ancestors of Kake people before the Flood, according to the late Johnny C. Jackson. So picturesque was the descriptive name that those returning long after the Flood, who had never seen the place, could recognize it from the name. Photo by N. Matsumoto

this rock, which had been a landmark to them during their migration north and still serves as a marker today.10 This too constitutes a form of ensemblage. As with the Lukaax.ádi sockeye blanket discussed in the previous chapter, this kind of bodily adornment maps the character of the land onto the body as an element of personhood. But the central feature of the geographic ensemblage is not a place but persons, who place elements of the geography on their bodies in order to mutually inscribe their character on the land and the land on their character. Through ensemblage, not only does space become “a society of named places,” as Lévi-Strauss (1966) observed, but members of society also become landscapes of named places. Having highlighted some semantic patterns in names on the land, it is important that I stress that place naming is not merely a mechanistic or rationalistic process in which places are identified and grouped for their metaphoric relations to the body or kin, or metonymic associations to key resources. Toponyms are carriers of mythopoetic tradi100 What’s in a Name?

tions as well, invoking shared historical experiences and legends and grounding them in a material reality of the continuous present. The semantics of Tlingit toponyms also reveal a concept of place that incorporates dimensions other than the physical here and now, that implicitly accepts the unseen as part of that which is seen, and that nests what once was in the realm of what clearly is now. Many Tlingit place-names are evocative of the mythical and historic past, insofar as they serve to cement the traditional relationship between a particular group or clan and the territory that continues to sustain them. In Glacier Bay and elsewhere associations are found that hearken back to mythological and historical events. For example, Kuts’een Gíl’x’i, or “Rat Cliff,” refers not to an abundance of ordinary rats at the cliff below Spokane Cove but rather to a single extraordinary rodent of epic proportions that once, long ago, kidnapped a young Tlingit maiden and took her to his cliff lair to be his wife. The villainous varmint eventually was subdued by the young woman’s brothers in a nasty battle at the site.11 Such toponymic references serve as historical citations on the text of the land, bringing events of the past into the present for new generations to learn. Mythological animal and plant references comprise 4 percent of the Tlingit toponymy in Glacier Bay; they are all but absent in the Euro-American toponymy. A special set of mythological references in Tlingit place-names are those that refer to the trickster-demiurge Raven. Though blessed with supernatural powers and a clever mind, Raven nevertheless had to labor to survive in the world. As the legends recount, he had to steal the various elements that comprise the world, and, after helping to transform the world, he embarked on a quest to gather together those items necessary to sustain (human) life: freshwater, firewood, and various food resources. His Tlingit relatives are still engaged in the quest and follow the trail he has left. People hunt, fish, and gather in the vicinity of X’as’tuhéen ([Raven’s] Driblet Creek), created by the drops that spilled from Raven’s mouth as he flew away from Petrel after stealing the latter’s springwater; collect intertidal resources at Yéil Kawóot (Raven’s Beads), amid limestone fossils that Raven once used to fashion a necklace for his wife; land their boats at Yéil Kiji Yakwdeiyí (Raven’s Wings Boat Road), where he calmed the sea and created a smooth trail amid the rocks so he could land his canoe; and fish in the What’s in a Name? 101

vicinity of Yéil Geiwú (Raven’s Web or Fishnet), now petrified in stone above the tide line, the “webbing” still visible. Other aspects of Raven are similarly enshrined in the landscape. Beyond biological referents to mythological or mundane plants, animals, and humans, a second major category of semantic references consists of topographical associations. These may be divided into two basic categories: (1) hydrographic, or those alluding to aquatic or shoreline features, and (2) terrestrial, or those referring to upland features of the landscape (see table 3.3). Topographical references other than generics make up 41 percent of the regional name set, with an overwhelming emphasis on hydrographic names (32 percent). Topographical references other than generics make up 59 percent of the Tlingit name set and 25 percent of the English. Significantly, 42 percent of all Tlingit place-names contain hydrographic references, another reflection of the culture’s maritime orientation. The majority of nongeneric Euro-American topographical referents, in contrast, are associated with upland features. What is more, Tlingit topographical referents in place-names are synesthetic. Tlingit names reflect not only the visual sense (what things look like) but also the auditory (Dàalagàaw, “Hollow Sound”), olfactory (Téey Chan Géeyak’w, “Little Bay Smelling of Yellow Cedar”), and even gustatory senses (X’alinukdzi X’áa, “Sweet Tasting Point”). Even the play of light and shadow is commented on. This contrasts with the English toponymy in the region, which tends to favor the static and the visual, and the terrestrial over the hydrographic. The English name set is also topographically impoverished in comparison to the Tlingit because of its overwhelming emphasis on biographical naming—places named for people—a phenomenon that is very uncommon in Tlingit, where people are named for places rather than vice versa. The Euro-American preoccupation with biographical names is especially evident in Glacier Bay, where only about one-third of the English toponyms contain biological or topographical referents beyond generics. Instead the English toponymy honors a vast array of individuals, from explorers (e.g., La Perouse Glacier, Dixon Entrance, Muir Inlet) to scientists (e.g., Geikie Inlet, Reid Glacier, Adams Inlet); missionaries (e.g., Young Island, Brady Glacier); entrepreneurs (e.g., Bartlett Cove, Willoughby Island, Ibach Point); inventors (e.g., Wilbur [of the Wright brothers] Mountain); surveyors (e.g., Riggs Glacier, Lars Island, Net102 What’s in a Name?

land Island); treasurers of the British Navy (Dundas Bay), and a host of other characters, many of whom never came within a thousand miles of Glacier Bay. Even Tlingits were enshrined in the landscape by whites. Sitka Charley (Charley Glacier) and Tyeen (Tyeen Glacier), members of John Muir’s expedition, were memorialized in glaciers, as were the Hoonah leader Kasohto (Kahsoto Glacier) and the Chilkat leader Kohklux (Kloh-Kutz Glacier).12 Ironically, such naming would be deemed odd, if not inappropriate, in Tlingit. Indeed, biographical naming is virtually absent from the Tlingit toponymy. As shown, rather than name places after people, the Tlingit custom was more commonly to name people after places. This aversion to biographical naming is a common feature among Native Americans and perhaps indigenous peoples in general. Moreover, the few exceptional places that are named for Tlingit individuals are derived from the salient presence and activities of the person at the named site and generally do not constitute a claim on the land in the individual’s honor. This difference in naming practices is undoubtedly linked to differing attitudes toward and interactions with the landscape. In the EuroAmerican perspective the individual was the basic social unit, the discoverer and possessor of the landscape. In the process of colonizing America it was natural for European explorers to honor their patrons, cohorts, and countrymen with place-names as a means both of paying tribute and of marking the land as their own. Many places were named prior to any significant interaction with the landscape and thus probably could not have included biological and topographical referents worthy of distinction. Similarly, the tradition of naming objects for prominent intellectual forebears is very strong in Western science. In Tlingit, by comparison, clans and house groups were the key social units, and property, political power, and even identity were concentrated at those levels. Tlingit scientific discoveries concerning the environment tended to be memorialized in toponyms with biological and topographical references whither the people derived their living. In these and other ways, cultural differences have contributed to different patterns in place naming.13 And, as the conflict over the naming of the Dzántik’i Héeni Middle School in Juneau attests, these differences persist to the present day. Finally, another divergence in Tlingit and Euro-American naming patWhat’s in a Name? 103

terns concerns habitation sites. Six percent of the Tlingit names refer directly to dwelling sites, including villages and forts, while no such references are found in English. The lack of references in English is not surprising considering that Euro-American habitation sites are often biographically named (e.g., Bartlett Cove, Gustavus, Juneau) and that permanent settlements came late to Glacier Bay and were outlawed in the course of its development as a monument, park, and preserve. In Tlingit the affix aan denotes a village, and noow denotes a fort or refuge. Forts were strategically important in the context of intra- and interethnic warfare dating back at least to the protohistoric period (Moss and Erlandson 1992). Place-names denoting habitation sites help keep ancestral dwelling grounds in memory. Similarly, as linguistic artifacts, they provide archeologists with important keys to understanding settlement patterns in Tlingit country.

pragmatic dimensions of place-names Keith Basso (1996) and others (see Thornton 1997a, 2004a) have demonstrated the power of place-names in achieving pragmatic cultural ends when deployed in discourse, such as the promotion of morality, healing, identity, character, wisdom, historical consciousness, and other prerogatives. When a place’s cultural associations are shared by the speaker and the audience, these cultural ends can often be achieved merely by speaking the place-name because the story and lessons behind it are already well known. In other cases, the story behind the name must be unpacked and contextualized to be understood. Given the wide variety of contexts in which place and place-names are evoked, their pragmatic functions are not easily classified. Broadly speaking, however, three important cognitive orientations that are embedded in place can be identified: social identity, time-space, and normative orientations. As shown, the intimate links between personal identity, social identity, and place are reflected in the fact that people, collectively and even individually, are often named for places. Clan and house-group histories form an important genre of Tlingit oral literature and pedagogy. Through these narratives a Tlingit person can trace the contours of his or her individual identity in relation to the evolution of the social group 104 What’s in a Name?

within Lingít Aaní. To the extent that social groups with distinct identities have a shared history, place-names and narratives may transcend social group boundaries to emphasize unity in historical time, as evidenced in the statement Ch’a Tleix’ Xakwnuwkeidí, or “We who are still one People of Sandbar Fort,” used to reference and rekindle solidarity among several Tlingit clans who descend from a settlement at Xakwnoowú (Sandbar Fort) in Glacier Bay National Park. The semiotic convergence between identity, place, and property is particularly emphasized in clan histories. Thus, when Robert Zuboff, a member of the Angoon Kak’weidí (People of Kak’w [Basket Bay]) clan, recounted the history of Basket Bay, or Kak’w (Little Basket), he remarked: “This is how the history is told, / about / Basket Bay, from the time it’s been ours . . . ages. / It was long ago, / it’s been long, / since the histories have been told of us; / we are named for it, / Kak’weidí” (in Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer 1987:67; translated from the Tlingit). Such narratives continue to be deployed to defend territory, mainly against non-Natives who disrespect Tlingit sovereignty and cultural patrimony. An illustrative example of this occurred in Glacier Bay National Park in the early 1990s. Park management had for years refused to recognize Tlingit claims to land and resources in its jurisdiction and had gradually frozen them out of their homeland (in what some Tlingits derisively termed “a second ice age”) through various prohibitive regulations and enforcement acts. On Memorial Day weekend in the spring of 1992, the major Tlingit clans from nearby Hoonah gathered in Glacier Bay National Park to mourn their deceased relatives and to protest the National Park Service’s denial of their customary and traditional rights. The bulk of the ceremony was concerned with recounting— through narrative, song, and dance—the ancestral ties that each clan maintained to places within the boundaries of the park and preserve. The recounting of ancestral names caused an emotional outpouring, especially among the older participants, who recalled their presence in Glacier Bay. Later, a written resolution was presented to the park superintendent and read aloud in Tlingit. Outlining the basis for the Huna Tlingits’ rights in Glacier Bay, the resolution included the assertion that the history of Glacier Bay was “recorded in the regalia, songs, stories, and names of the descendants of Glacier Bay” (see hia 1994; emphasis added). Similarly, in proposed legislation for the U.S. Congress conWhat’s in a Name? 105

cerning Huna Tlingits’ rights in Glacier Bay, the Hoonah Indian Association (hia, the tribal government) chose to deploy the oldest of three Tlingit names for the bay, S’e Shuyee (Drainage at the End of the Glacial Mud), to emphasize the Hunas’ antiquity and aboriginal rights in the area “identified by the federal government as ‘Glacier Bay National Park.’” Like Robert Zuboff and Kadashan (quoted at the head of this chapter), Huna clan leaders submitted their knowledge of names as a fundamental part of their claim to the territory. Beyond social group identities and boundaries embedded in clan histories, spatial and temporal orientations are constructed in other ways through stories and names on the land. I have already touched on the mythic time events involving Raven and other extraordinary beings who literally shaped the landscape through their activities and whose deeds are immortalized as chronotopes (places in a community’s geography where time and space are fused) in Tlingit shagóon. Like the Australian aboriginal concept of the Dreaming, shagóon posits a dynamic fusion of time and space in the landscape. The land constitutes the ground of being, a potent congelation of historical activities, and, to the extent that it embodies the wisdom of the ages and powerful ancestral spirits, a compelling force in contemporary life. Correlatively, it is through the landscape and one’s knowledge of its historical and sacred places that the underlying order of the cosmos—and by extension one’s shagóon or place within it—is revealed. As with T. G. H. Strehlow’s (1947:31) Northern Aranda, the country is for the Tlingit individual a “living, ageold family tree” that continues to grow and resonate through his or her own being and dwelling on the land. It must be this way; as the Lukaax.ádi song declares: “Lest my ancestors’ land lie desolate, you will always hear my voice there.” Thus, according to his Dreaming— his shagóon—Lukaax.ádi elder Austin Hammond aspires to continue to fish for sockeye in the same locale where his ancestral relative was taken by the giant red salmon at Chilkoot Lake and to dwell in the same landscape that his ancestor, Raven, helped create through various deeds that are commemorated in toponyms like Yéil Áx’sh Wulgeigi Yé (Place Where Raven Swung, a cut between two peaks) and Yéil Daa.axu (Raven’s Luggage, a constellation of rocks in Chilkoot River) (sensc 1995–2002). His own being on the land will maintain and extend his shagóon as well as that of his clan. 106 What’s in a Name?

It may be that this kind of place consciousness, common to huntergatherers of Australia and North America and elsewhere, is part of our deep, collective human heritage. Significantly, the Dreaming and, less commonly, shagóon are sometimes translated as “the law.” This is indicative of the powerful role of place not only in defining time in space but also in maintaining normative orientations. Just as Basso’s Western Apache use stories embedded in place-names as moral touchstones, so too do Tlingits use stories to convey important lessons about morality and normative behavior. Glacier Bay again serves as a richly illustrative example. Glacier Bay has been shaped by the advance and retreat of the mammoth tidewater glaciers that now sit at the head of the bay. The most recent advances of the glacier correspond to changes wrought by the Little Ice Age commencing about seven hundred years ago. Tlingit oral history documents their presence in the bay prior to the Little Ice Age (and archeological evidence suggests human habitation in the area dating back almost ten thousand years), and Chookaneidí clan history links the glacier’s most recent and tragic advance to the violation of a taboo by a young Chookanshaa (female member of the clan) (see Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer 1987:244–91; Thornton 1995; Cruikshank 2005:158– 60). The woman, Kaasteen, violates her prescribed seclusion at menarche by communicating with a glacier. A sentient being itself, the glacier (Sít’k’i T’ooch’, “Little Black Glacier”) responds by advancing rapidly and destroying the tribe’s settlement (L’eiwshaa Shakee Aan, “Town on Top of the [Glacial] Sand Dune”), claiming the life of a female member of the clan who remains behind and forcing the exodus of the Tlingit from Glacier Bay. Because the glacier claimed the life of a Chookanshaa, the clan in compensation now claims the landmark as a crest, or at.óow. This claim and the story behind it are referenced in many media, including a button blanket (fig. 3.2), which, like the sockeye blanket in the previous chapter, serves simultaneously as a cultural map, historical icon, moral text, and legal title to the landscape. In presenting the story of Kaasteen as at.óow, normative orientations of moral behavior, relations between human and nonhuman beings and spirits, and ties between people and places are reinforced in powerful ways. Perhaps most powerful are the songs. Songs are an important genre of at.óow and place making that engender strong cognitive and emoWhat’s in a Name? 107

fig. 3.2. Chookaneidí Glacier Bay button blanket. This button-style blanket (x’óow) maps sacred sites and stories of the Chookaneidí clan in Glacier Bay, including L’eiwshaa Shakee Aan (Town on Top of the [Glacial] Sand Dune), where Kaasteen (bottom center), a young woman in menarche, called to the glacier Sít’k’i T’ooch’ (Little Black Glacier; center), violating her taboo of seclusion, thus causing the glacier to advance and destroy the village and forcing her people to evacuate. The blanket also features other crests of the Chookaneidí, including the brown bear, and serves as a historical and legal record of Chookaneidí ties and rights to Glacier Bay. Photo by T. Thornton

tional ties to place and homeland. With their accompanying gestures, dances, and mimetic reflections of place, songs amplify and re-present the content and sentiments expressed in clan histories. Among the most poignant examples of this are two grieving songs composed by Chookaneidí during their exodus from Glacier Bay. Centuries after the fact, these songs still evoke and encapsulate the feelings of despondency that accompanied the Chookaneidí’s loss of their relative and homeland. The first song, composed and sung as they departed L’eiwshaa Shakee Aan (at Bartlett Cove, site of the current park headquarters) just ahead of the advancing, earthshaking glacier, mourns: “Won’t my house / be pitiful / won’t my house / be pitiful / when I leave on foot /. . . . Won’t 108 What’s in a Name?

my land / be pitiful / won’t my land / be pitiful / when I leave by boat” (in Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer 1987:283). Later, a second song of mourning was composed just outside Glacier Bay at Wanachích (known today as Pleasant Island): “My land, / will I ever / see it again /. . . . My house, / will I ever / see it again?” (287–89). Because of the profound feelings of sadness they evoke, these songs are typically only voiced on “heavy” occasions, such as a funeral or memorial potlatch. When they are sung, their geographic context is always emphasized, and afterward the Glacier Bay diaspora is traced with each clan initially going to a separate settlement—the Chookaneidí to Spaaski Bay (Lakooxás’ T’akhéen), the Wooshkeetaan to Excursion Inlet (Kuyeik’), and the Kaagwaantaan to Ground Hog Bay (Kax’ noowú)—before eventually reconsolidating at the modern village of Hoonah (Xunaa).14 When Amy Marvin, clan mother (Naa Tláa) of the Chookaneidí, told this story to a gathering of scientists in Glacier Bay National Park in 1993 (see Culp et al. 1995:306), she confessed through a translator that “it was very difficult for my grandparents to tell this story—it always brought tears to their eyes. I experienced that difficulty when I was getting ready to come over here today. I have that same feeling.” At the same time, she observed that the sorrowful songs are also a source of strength—a gift: “When we have problems, when we’re thinking of our family that are deceased, and we’re going to repay the kindness of the Raven tribe [the opposite moiety], that is when we use these songs.” Similarly, when traditional Chookaneidí visit Glacier Bay today they may sing, pray, and leave gifts of tobacco or food to honor and feed the spirits of ancestors who dwelled and died on this land, so they don’t “lie desolate.” In this way, the ancestors’ trails of inhabitation, suffering, and fortitude and the continuing presence of their spirits on the land serve to orient and inspire (literally to breathe spirit into) contemporary Tlingits.

conclusion: naming, knowing, and belonging This chapter has examined the structure and content of Tlingit placenames in relation to universal cognitive schemata and particularistic cultural principles and interests. While certain cognitive universals apply to Tlingit place naming, such as the use of generics in identifying major What’s in a Name? 109

geographical features, employment of the body as a metaphor for landscape, and the correlation of population and toponymic densities and the constraints of the Magic Number 500, ultimately the gestalt and resonance of naming (or non-naming) can be fully understood only in terms of Tlingit ideology and practice. Places are conceptualized by individuals under specific ecological, social, and historical circumstances through cultural models of the way the world works. As a consequence, investigations of cultural and crosscultural place-naming patterns should lead back to a theoretical understanding of the linguistic, cognitive, experiential, and other cultural models that motivate naming. Though the origin of most place-names is part of that “hoary antiquity” to which Waterman alludes (1922:175; see also Thornton 1997a), researchers are fortunate to have a cultural model of the Tlingit namer in Raven. Through his adventures, misadventures, and quest to survive and make sense of the world, Raven apprehends and interacts with Tlingit country much as a Tlingit would. Similarly, his way of naming the land is emblematic of Tlingit processes of naming. In the course of his travels, Raven names both the corporeal beings he encounters and the places he discovers. Some of the toponyms he bestows commemorate events, such as the landmark that is named “after the name of a small canoe, because one of these was passing at the time” (Swanton 1909:21), or qualities of the place (i.e., “Noisy Beach”). Yet, for the most part, the place-names dispensed by Raven fall into the metaphoric/metonymic categories described above. For example, a hollow filled with trees that Raven perceives to resemble young men is named “Where There Is a Crowd of Boys” and a point on the coast subject to powerful undertow is called “Point Holding Things Back,” and so on. Raven also was destined to “[show] all the Tlingit what to do for a living” (Swanton 1909:83); consequently, many of the toponyms he bestows serve this cultural interest, as when Raven informs Bear of “a good [halibut] fishing ground” in an area he named “Just on the Edge of the Base of the Kelp” (Geesh K’ishuwanyee, discussed above), indicating both a specific resource patch and a general principle for locating such places. Raven tales provide a model for naming and classifying places and suggestions for how to interact with them in appropriate ways.

110 What’s in a Name?

Like Tlingits, Raven speaks to places, too, and makes sense of them in relation to each other, and to existing prototypes. Thus, when he arrived at the place he later was to name Skanáx (Noisy Beach; known as Saginaw Bay in English), Raven talked to it in order to make it into Nass [River] . . . but, when the tide was out great numbers of clams on the flats made so much noise shooting up at him that his voice was drowned, and he could not succeed. He tried to put all kinds of berries there but in vain. After many attempts, he gave it up and went away saying, “I tried to make you into Nass, but you would not let me.” So you can be called [Skanáx]. (In Swanton 1909:15)

Though it resembles his beloved and prototypical Nass River, the affordances of Skanáx are not the same as those at Nass. Berries are perhaps not as abundant as at Nass, whereas clams are more bountiful, indeed so plentiful that their cacophonous “shooting up at him” overwhelms his senses, literally preventing him from redundantly creating another Nass purely out of want, longing, or nostalgia. In this episode Raven shows that place naming is an organic process involving a dialogue between the human senses, cultural models of experience, and key characteristics and affordances of the environment. Raven cannot simply impose a prototypical cultural model onto Skanáx. At a fundamental level the place must speak for itself, and the namer should listen. Insofar as names of actual places are woven throughout Tlingit creation myths, these toponyms suggest a relationship to the landscape that differs from the dominant Euro-American paradigm on an ontological level. Toponyms that appear in creation myths by definition denote sacred spaces, which “[make] possible the ‘founding of the world’; where the sacred manifests itself in space, the real unveils itself, the world comes into existence . . . and makes possible ontological passage from one mode of being to another” (Eliade 1959:63). The hierophanic concept of place makes mythopoetic Being continuous with mundane being, and subsistence, which may be translated as “real being” (Thornton 1999a), itself becomes a sacred act. Clearly, the act of naming is a powerful one. Through naming, one

What’s in a Name? 111

may not only capture vital information about a location but also implicitly lay claim to a particular place by virtue of articulating one’s special relationship to it. With naming comes knowledge, and with knowledge, power: the power not only to use, control, and possess but also, just as important, to define. As the Tlingit creation myth recounts: When his son was born, Kit-ka’ositiyiqa [Raven’s father, Keetk’a Usitiyik Ká, “The Man Up There That Is”] tried to instruct him and train him in every way and, after he grew up, told him he would give him strength to make a world. After trying all sorts of ways Raven finally succeeded (Swanton 1909:3).

That which is created is not fully real until it has been named; this is not the least of the lessons of Raven in his quest to make a world. Following Raven, Tlingits keep going back to places in their own quest to make a world. So writes the Kake Tlingit poet Robert Davis (1989) in his poem “Saginaw Bay: I Keep Going Back”: He dazzles you right out of water Right out of the moon, the sun and fire. Cocksure smoothtalker, good looker, Raven makes a name for himself Up and down the coast from Nass River, Stirs things up. ........... He moves north, Kuiu Island, Saginaw Bay— Wind country, rain country, Its voices try to rise through fog, the long tongue of the sea sliding beneath the bay. ........... The Tsaagweidi clan settled there first, it was right. Beaches sloped beneath canoes greased with seal fat, 112 What’s in a Name?

they carried the Seal clan to these creeks Shaking with humpies and dog salmon. ........... Sometimes it felt like the center of the world, mountains circling within reach. At its mouth on a knoll A fortress guarded against intruders. They came anyway, from the south, a swift slave raid. They destroyed the village. The people fled every direction. ........... After the massacre, the battered clan collected themselves and moved north to Kupreanof island. That became the village of Kake. Those became Kakekwaan. And every once in awhile One sees in his mind Raven tracks hardened in Rock at Saginaw where Raven dug his feet in and tugged the mudflats clear into the woods. He made a small Nass because he grew homesick there, and in those moments, they feel like going back too ........... When I was young everyone used Tlingit And English words at once

What’s in a Name? 113

Tlingit fit better. ........... I know there’s a Tlingit name for that bay It means something like “Everything Shifted,” I don’t remember the name of the Halleck Harbor shaman except he was most powerful and I feel somehow tied to him. Was he the one wrapped in cedar mat sunk in the channel only to reappear at Pt. White ascending the beach to his own grieving ceremony? I don’t know. I get mixed up. But I know my own name, it’s connected to some battle. ........... Listen, I’m trying to say something— always our stories stayed alive through paintings, always our stories stayed alive in retelling. You wonder why sometimes you can’t reach me? I keep going back. I keep trying to see my life against all this history, Raven in the beginning hopping about like he just couldn’t do enough.

Through this reflection can be seen the importance of names—place names, clan names, personal names, and even names for at.óow—and 114 What’s in a Name?

of Linnaeus’s dictum that, “if you don’t know the names, your knowledge of things perishes.” Yet even when Tlingit names are forgotten, as in the case of Mr. Davis, he remains somehow possessed by them, and other cognitive frames—stories, songs, paintings, and, most especially, sensuous perceptions of the landscape itself—aid his memory in seeing his life “against all this history” (shagóon). Such is the nature of place intelligence in Tlingit cognition. It is not only, as Kadashan states, that knowing the names of places is why “this country belongs to us” but also that knowledge of place and seeing of one’s life in the land “against all this history” makes Tlingits feel, inalienably, that they belong to this country. Despite the fact that “everything shifted,” this impetus continues to inspire Tlingits to name new places, like Dzántik’i Héeni Middle School, and persons, like Chaak’ti (Caretaker of Hamilton Bay), with belonging in mind.

What’s in a Name? 115

4 production and place “It was easy for me to put up fish there.”

As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce it. —karl marx, The German Ideology

Pausing in the middle of his 1946 statement on his people’s use and claims to lands and waters around Kake, elder Fred Friday offered this vision of his Tlingit landscape: “The Native people know all the points and rocks and every little area by name. If I told you all the names of all the places that I know it would fill many pages. These areas were used so much that we were familiar with every little place” (Goldschmidt and Haas 1998:177). Previous chapters of this book underscore the first part of Fred Friday’s claim: the vast majority of major terrestrial and hydrographic features of Southeast Alaska were named by the Tlingits and other indigenous inhabitants of the region. This chapter explores the second part of his vision, that of an indigenous landscape enlivened by the resonance of a rich geographic nomenclature and individual and collective experiences of using areas “so much that we were familiar with every little place.” What Fred Friday glosses as “use” is conventionally termed “subsistence uses,” a form of economic production that has come to be defined in public policy terms as “the customary and traditional uses by rural Alaska residents of wild, renewable resources for direct personal or family consumption.” In contrast to Friday’s place-based vision of subsistence, this government definition, enshrined in the federal Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980 (anilca, p.l. 96487, sec. 803), says nothing about the particular geographic settings of subsistence activities. This is not unintentional, for anilca is a sequel 116

to an earlier piece of legislation known as the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, which formally extinguished aboriginal territorial, hunting, and fishing rights in favor of a business corporation model of land and resource title and development. anilca partially restored noncommercial subsistence use rights (for Alaska’s rural residents as opposed to Natives), but in a limited context. anilca entitles rural community dwellers (in Tlingit country this means everyone but residents of Juneau and Ketchikan) to preferential use of defined fish, wildlife, and plant resources, but only if managers (typically state biologists) determine that these resources are scarce enough that they must be allocated according to the subsistence use priority (over sport and commercial users) and rural preference. In practice, this policy might translate into residents of a rural community obtaining a preference in time (e.g., an earlier opening for hunting or fishing); space (e.g., “subsistence only” fishing in a certain stream); or quantity (e.g., higher bag or possession limits). However, to date, the granting of such subsistence preferences have been the exception rather than the norm. More important, there is no recognition of Native individual, house, clan, kwáan, or tribal ties to specific resource areas—to particular places—despite the fact that anilca maintains that subsistence “is essential to Native physical, economic, traditional, and cultural existence.” In practice, the government has viewed subsistence not as a set of relationships to particular places but merely as a form of noncommercial economic use of wild “resources,” whose practitioners receive preferential treatment only if commercial economic uses of resources (or other environmental factors) severely threaten “reasonable opportunities” (cf. Caldwell 1998) for subsistence uses in broad (and often culturally meaningless) regions defined by the modern state bureaucracy and its resource managers. In short, while subsistence has a place in Alaskan public policy, that policy typically is not sensitive to the fundamental role of place in Native subsistence economies. Alaska Natives tend to take a different view. Tlingits, in particular, regard subsistence as an intricate and profound set of relationships with particular geographic settings where their social groups have dwelled historically. For them subsistence is haa kusteeyí, “our way of living,” “real being,” an “enriching existence,” and not “the minimum (food, etc.) necessary to support life,” as dictionaries and non-Natives often Production and Place 117

define it (see Thornton 1998, 1999a). Indeed, a recent reissue of a booklet originally titled The Subsistence Lifeway of the Tlingit People (Newton and Moss 1983) was retitled Haa Atxaayí Haa Kusteeyíx Sitee, Our Food Is Our Tlingit Way of Life (Newton and Moss 2005) to emphasize this very point. Tlingit, like all Alaska Native languages, emphasizes the broad, holistic, and fundamental meanings of subsistence. As the foundation for existence, Tlingits defined themselves by the pathways and projects they adhered to in obtaining, processing, and distributing what have come to be known as “subsistence resources.” Collectively, these activities formed a seasonal cycle not only for material production but also for social, political, educational, and spiritual activities. Today, subsistence production remains foundational to Tlingits’ identity, experience, and culture, but pathways and projects have changed in many cases, often in profound ways. This chapter analyzes the relationship between place and material production in detail. Specifically, I argue that in pre- and early postcolonial Tlingit society, place and being were intimately linked to projects of production that were conceived of as existing on relative experiential cycles of time (season) and space (path). Changes in these cycles, functions mainly of technological innovation and increased competition and regulation of Tlingit production by non-Tlingits, have undermined this productive sense of place in various ways, depending on the degree of disruption or transformation. Notwithstanding these changes, however, the role of places in nourishing and sustaining human life—even afterlife—continues to be of paramount concern in Tlingit culture, especially in communities and households where significant production of wild foods is still carried out.

the nature of tlingit production “Production is the interaction of man and nature,” says Karl Polanyi (1944:130). It includes not only hunting, fishing, and gathering of foods but also the manufacture of such things as technologies and art. As emphasized in previous chapters, productive interactions with nature also involve emotions (Milton 2002) and intuition and “poetic involvement” (Ingold

118 Production and Place

2000:25, 57) through the place-names, narratives, at.óow, and other means of engaging the field of relations that constitute the Tlingit lifeworld as shagóon. To neglect the role of the nonmaterial in production, or “procurement,” to use Nurit Bird-David’s (1992) relational term, would be to subjugate the important principles of Tlingit ecology, including its sentience, relational epistemology (Bird-David 1999), and relational sustainability (Langdon 2002). For hunter-gatherers like the Tlingit do not “approach their environment as an external world of nature that has to be ‘grasped’ conceptually and appropriated symbolically within the terms of an imposed cultural design, as a precondition for effective action . . . indeed, the separation of mind and nature has no place in their thought and practice.” (Ingold 2000:42). As a consequence, “the differences between the [economic] activities of hunter-gatherers on the one hand, and singing, story-telling and narration of myth on the other, cannot be accommodated within the terms of a dichotomy between the material and the mental, between the ecological interaction in nature and the cultural constructions of nature. On the contrary, both sets of activities are, in the first place, ways of dwelling” (57). Here I focus on the place-context of production through dwelling, particularly the harvest, processing, and meaning of food. In the aboriginal Tlingit economy, food production was the dominant project in terms of not only time allocation but also ideology. Sitka elder Herman Kitka put it simply: “If we didn’t put up our foods, we wouldn’t have a culture.” As food is a paramount element of culture, it is also a paramount element of place. For to procure food—to subsist—is quintessentially to dwell, to gain sustenance and “real being” from places. And places, like all environments, “are constituted in life, not just in thought, and it is only because we live in an environment that we can think” (Ingold 2000:60). Today, as in the past, specific foods are harvested and processed at specific times of the year depending on abundance, distribution, accessibility, and need. Typical Tlingit seasonal rounds have been described by various observers (e.g., Niblack [1890] 1970; Oberg 1973; de Laguna 1972; Thornton 2004b). However, it is important to note that every village’s seasonal round—indeed that of every house group— varied to a degree as a result of micro-ecological differences affecting

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the factors listed above, though the primary periods for similar activities in different villages were often the same. Thus, in composing a generalized portrait of the Tlingit seasonal round, one way to account for variation is to distinguish between primary and secondary harvest periods by species. The appendix constructs such a portrait on the basis of conventional Western seasonality. For Tlingits time was a function of hunting, fishing, and gathering seasonality, as opposed to the agricultural seasonality that underlies terms like spring, summer, and fall. Tlingit calendars were reckoned according to “moons” (twelve or thirteen months) marking key climatic conditions, ecological phenomena, and cultural projects that defined a community’s dwelling at various times of the year. Table 4.1 shows sample calendars from northern Southeast Alaska. As can be seen, the names of the moons—Héen Táanáx Kayaaní Dísi (Plants Grow Underwater Moon) or K’úxw dísi (Marten [Trapping] Moon), rather than March, for example—highlight key processes and relationships in Tlingit living space, such as the maturation, reproduction, and harvest cycles of key plants (e.g., seaweeds in March), fish (e.g., salmon in June and July), and animals (e.g., marten in March, and many others in May and June). Beyond seasonality, another way to analyze the subsistence round is in terms of time allocation to various activities. The only ethnographer to construct a rigorous time-activity portrait (but not a time-space portrait à la Hägerstrand) of the Tlingit is Kalervo Oberg (1973), who worked in Klukwan in 1931–32. His calculations are reproduced in figure 4.1. As with the generalizations about seasonal activities, Oberg’s generalizations about time budgeting for Klukwan are not strictly applicable to every community, as a result of local environmental and economic variations. Oberg’s portrait also represents the temporal commitments of a postcontact, mixed economy, though the study was done in the depression era of self-reliance and in a community still regarded as isolated and “old-fashioned” and highly dependent on wild foods. Together, these two sources of information provide a composite sketch of both the duration and intensity of particular activities over a given year. However, what are missing from these idealized portraits of the seasonal round are the settings of production, the places in which subsistence activities occur. Every production activity or project takes place in one or more specific locales that are intimately linked to that activity 120 Production and Place

table 4.1. Island and Mainland Calendars (Moons) among the Northern Tlingit Island (e.g., Sitka or Angoon) Calendar

Mainland (e.g., Chilkat/ Chilkoot) Calendar (Emmons 1991; see also Oberg 1973)*

Approximate Month

Xáat Dísi (Salmon [Harvesting] Moon) or Atka Taa dísi (“[Animals] Fattening Moon)

Asxukw Disi (Drying Moon) / Tlexa Aatxaan Dísi (Smoking Salmon Moon)

July

Shaa Xeiyí Dísi (Mountain Shadows Moon)

Shaa Xeiyí Dísi (New Snow on Mountains Moon) or Kuk’eet (Berry Picking)

August

Dís Yádi (Child Moon; referring to the weaning of young animals); also Kaxweix Dísi (Highbush Cranberry Moon)

S’aax Tlaa Dísi (Groundhog Mother Moon) / Kaxwéix Dísi

September

Dís Tlein (Big Moon)

Kusi.áat K’áchk’w (Little Cold)

October

Kukahaa Dís (Digging / Scratching Moon [bears dig winter dens])

Kukahaa dís or Dleit K’áchk’w (Little Snow)

November

Shaanáx Dís (Head through Moon; hair shows on a seal fetus’s head)

Shaanáx Dís Kukaxeit (Digging / Scratching Moon)

December

T’aawák Dísi (Canada Goose Moon)

T’aawák Dísi (Goose Moon) or She warchel [?] (Leaves Falling)

January

S’eek Dísi (Black Bear Moon; when cubs are born)

Kutí Káchk’u Dísi (Small Weather)

February

Héen Táanáx Dísi (Underwater Leaves [Sprout] Moon)

K’óox Dísi (Marten [Trapping] Moon) or Héen Taanáx Kayaaní Dísi (Plants Grow Underwater Moon)

March

X’éigaa Kayaaní Dísi (True Budding Moon; land plants sprout)

Kahaakw.ish (Fish Egg [Eulachon, Herring] Spawn)

April

At Gadaxeet Yinaa Dísi Kayaaní Dísi (Plants Moon) (Ripening [of Animals] Moon)

May

At Gadaxeet Dísi (Birthing [of animals] Moon)

June

Xáat Dísi (Salmon Moon)

note: Compiled from Emmons 1991, Oberg 1973, McClellan 1975, Thornton 2004, and field notes.

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

May

Deep - sea fishing Fur gathering Hunting

April

June

July

Aug

Oct Berry picking Bark gathering Herb and root gathering

Sept

Nov

Dec

Feb Salmon fishing Shellfish gathering Seaweed gathering

Jan

fig. 4.1. Time spent (%) resource gathering, Klukwan, 1931 (reproduces the calculations of Oberg 1973).

March

in memory. Following Giddens, I have termed these activity centers “locales,” emphasizing their position as hubs of socioeconomic activity. Implicit in each locale are not only an activity and a physical setting but a social setting as well. In this sense, material production is not only what is produced but when, where, and how it is produced and with whom—what Marx termed the “relations of production.” These implicit connections are made explicit when people talk about place. To understand these connections, I use the following extended example. In April 1994, Herman Kitka, an eighty-year-old elder from Sitka, spoke to a session of the Alaska Anthropological Association on his knowledge of Native place-names in the Sitka area. He chose to speak on the constellation of places that were most important to his own being, and he stressed the spatiotemporal and social coordination of specific activities or “projects” in relation to two focal places: his winter village of Sitka and his family’s seasonal settlement at Deep Bay. As with the conventional Tlingit calendar, his year begins in the late spring, when his family moves from the winter village to the fish camp. My family was very lucky in selecting Deep Bay for their customary and traditional subsistence use. Deep Bay was called L’ukanax. My family moved to Deep Bay in May after the herring roe harvest in Sitka Sound. Black seaweed and ribbon seaweed was picked from the beaches in Salisbury Sound, which was only about three or four miles from Deep Bay. The teaching was done by an uncle in each clan. The uncles taught the young people the names of the places, months, and what tide to pick the seaweed. The next lesson was how to go about drying the seaweed to preserve it for use year round. The taking of our customary, traditional food supply was taught by uncles through all families of Southeast Alaska. With seaweed all taken care of, the next undertaking was to fish for halibut for drying. Bait for the halibut hooks has to be gotten. Uncle took us to Rapids Island at low tide. We learned to look for octopus dens at low tide’s edge. We learned from Uncle how to catch the octopus with a gaff hook. Next, our uncle split the young group into two groups. One group was told to cut down alder wood for the smokehouses; the other group was shown how to bait the hooks. Uncle took us into the narrows outside of Deep Bay.

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Uncle showed us the halibut fish hole, which he called eet in Tlingit. Next, we learned how to line-up the Halibut eet or fish holes by lining up two points on the beach. Today I still use this Halibut eet line-up to catch my subsistence halibut for drying at Deep Bay. With enough halibut caught and drying in the smokehouses to satisfy all the families in Deep Bay, halibut fishing stopped. Uncle noticed how we enjoyed the fishing; he told us that to fish for the halibut for fun we would be wasting our food supply—to do so would offend the Holy Spirit [Haa Shageinyaa] and cause us to lose our blessing and go hungry. Back to winter homes in Sitka to store our subsistence foods for next winter use. In my lifetime a change in living took place—going to canneries for summer work and seine fishing. All our families moved to Ford Arm cannery, which was first called Cape Edwards Packing Company, later renamed Deep Sea Salmon Company. All the older men went seine fishing for salmon for two months. The women all worked in the cannery. After the fishing season closed, the families all moved back to Sitka again. The families again got camping equipment and collected to go to fish camp at Deep Bay; also jars for canning berries were taken, along with fishing gear for catching late summer dog and coho salmon for drying. Uncle again told his trainees, “We can only take enough salmon for all the needs of each family in Deep Bay.” Smokehouses were loaded with the fires being attended by our elders. Next, Uncle took all available persons berry picking. The berry picking places were out in the straits outside of Deep Bay among all the islands. Each island had a Tlingit name, so we can remember where to get the blueberries in the future when we get old enough to go on our own. The next project was to go seal hunting. Only the older boys were taken. I was lucky to be one of the seal hunters. We were taught how to shoot. The seal hunting areas were outside Deep Bay on certain islands, reefs, and narrow passes between the islands. After a lot of misses by each hunter, we finally learned the proper way to shoot at the seals in the water. Uncle showed us how to skin the seals, save the fat, meat, and skins. We learned how to make stretchers using green, small alder poles. Sealskins were dried for winter projects in Sitka. The fat and some meat were saved from young seals for smoking. Fat 124 Production and Place

was rendered out and put in containers. Seal hunting stopped when all families in Deep Bay had enough for use through the year. Next project—Uncle showed us how to make deer calls. A deer hunting party was selected, three persons to each party. Uncle took the hunting party up the mountain on the west side of Deep Bay—half way up in a basin on the mountain. Uncle told us to spread out and keep very quiet while he blew his deer call—one a little long call, the next very short. He called in three deer while he was showing us how to use the deer call. The three deer were shot by the hunters selected to do the shooting. We got all three deer. Then Uncle showed us how to clean and fix the deer for packing back to camp. Two hunters in each group of three were selected to each pack a deer apiece back to camp, one person in each group had to be a look-out for safety reasons in bear country, and to take turns in packing the deer back to camp. All the hunters were successful that day. Deer were all skinned and cut for smoking and hung up in the smokehouses. After three days of smoking, the deer meat was taken down and cut into small chunks for cooking in pots. After cooking, the deer meat was put on racks again up in the smokehouses and then dipped in seal oil and packed in containers and covered with seal oil. This type of preserving smoked deer meat kept without spoiling through the winter to be eaten as “cold cuts.” All fish, meat, and berries preserved, the families again moved back to Sitka, our winter homes. The next project—the older men prepared for the winter trapping season that would start in December and January. My grand folks, my dad, and uncles went to Emmons Island at the entrance of Hoonah Sound, just ten miles north of Deep Bay. Each family from Sitka also had their own trapping areas. Some of our subsistence foods were gotten from our winter homes at Sitka. Gathering of clams and fishing for bottom fish, rockfish, flounders, halibut, crabs and shrimp were done from our winter homes at Sitka. Before the [commercial] herring sac roe fishery, the Sitka Tlingits used to engage in herring roe fishing from small rowboats. The herring caught in small rowboats was used for making herring oil. Herring roe was taken and dried in trees among the islands around Sitka. All the small islands have Tlingit names and were used together with all other families in the Sitka area. This herring was done the last week in March and the first two weeks in April, mostly under Uncles’ directions to each family group.

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All this teaching was done where our customary, traditional subsistence food supply was gotten. This teaching was what made each Tlingit a good citizen in each community. The young people learned to respect the land they live on. They also learned to take only what each family needed to make it throughout the year. We need to keep on teaching our children our subsistence lifestyle and our culture and religion. Without this teaching our Tlingit cultures will be lost forever.1

This is a phenomenal portrait of subsistence, giving full weight to the spatiotemporal setting as well as to the richness of particular places through individual experience and communal pathways and projects on the land. In his narrative, Mr. Kitka naturally weds particular food production projects to particular places. Procurement of food is a yearround endeavor and, as such, constrains not only where he travels but when and with whom. In such a subsistence economy, the spatial, temporal, social, and project contexts become integral parts of one’s conceptions of places—their boundaries, their links, their meanings—and the basis for place intelligence (Thornton 2004a). In this way, Deep Bay is a nexus not only for subsistence but also for learning and growing up, for family ties and social structure, for continuity and change, and, in the end, for Mr. Kitka’s own being and Tlingit culture itself.

path and project For Herman Kitka, locales for subsistence projects are fundamentally linked in time and space by paths en route to activities. These paths are constrained by the spatiotemporal organization of natural resources in the environment as well as by the organization of society in relating to that environment. Thus, Mr. Kitka went to Deep Bay not because it was the best or nearest place to harvest salmon but because it is a good place to harvest salmon and his family owns it and he knows it well. While resource availability and territoriality influenced where one harvested foods, the seasons influenced when. The sequencing of food production projects, then, took place in a geographical and social time and space. Path and project are the two fundamental building blocks of timegeography (Pred 1986:10): 126 Production and Place

According to the path concept, each of the actions and events consecutively making up the existence of an individual has both temporal and spatial attributes. Consequently, the biography of a person is ever on the move with him or her and can be conceptualized and diagrammed at daily or lengthier scales of observation as an unbroken, continuous path through time-space, subject to various types of constraint.

A project, moreover, may be defined in time-geographic language as “the entire series of simple or complex tasks necessary to complete any intentional-inspired or goal-oriented behavior. Each of the sequential tasks in a short- or long-term project is synonymous with the coupling together in time and space of the uninterrupted paths of two or more people or of one or more persons and one or more tangible inputs or resources” (10). The conjunction of particular individual paths with particular cultural (or institutional) projects at specific temporal and spatial settings is what makes place “a historically contingent process,” in Allan Pred’s terms, and shagóon (heritage and destiny) and haa kusteeyí (“our way of living”) in Tlingit terms. Mr. Kitka’s Deep Bay narrative exemplifies this experience of subsistence.

traditional seasonal paths Since food production was until the mid-twentieth century the dominant and sustaining project in social life, it remains intimately bound up with notions of path and place. Consequently, when they were asked to testify about their possessory rights (Goldschmidt and Haas 1998) to specific locales and what these places were used for, Tlingit respondents invariably made reference not only to their social connections to the landscape but to the productive projects that took place at particular sites. This testimony was, as often as not, organized according to where the place lies on the traditional seasonal path (Thornton 1998). A typical theme was for a witness to describe a locale, the path to get there, and the activities that took place there. For example, “There was also a hooligan [eulachon] camp around Haines for smoking hooligans in the spring after the first run. This camp was at Taiyasanka [Deyeisaank’i] Harbor. Toward the end of May or the beginning of June Production and Place 127

the people camped and put up hooligans at the Four-mile and Ten-mile camps. There was a village and camp at Berners Bay where fish was smoked. We hunted and fished there and gathered berries during the summer” (James H. Lee, no. 7, in Goldschmidt and Haas 1998:101–2). The emphasis here is especially on habitation sites, the seasonal camps where people dwelled during subsistence production. In the witness’s memory, the seasonal path moves smoothly from spring into summer. Yet, in following the temporal path of production, Mr. Lee must make a spatial jump from the hooligan production camp at Taiyasanka Harbor to the salmon smoking camp at Berners Bay, more than forty miles to the south. This is revealing not only of the paths of production but of the environment itself, which can be conceptualized as a patchwork of very productive locales separated by pathways of travel. This productive emphasis is reflected more generally in Tlingit conceptions of space. As de Laguna (1960:20) has observed, unlike Westerners, who feel their geographic knowledge to be incomplete “so long as there remain blank spaces on the map,” Tlingits refer not to areas or measures of space but rather “to specific spots: fishing streams, coves, berry patches, or house sites, etc., and the terrain or waters between these places are simply the relatively undifferentiated landscape through which one travels in going from one to the other.” In other words, subsistence paths and projects, along with social structural links, were the relational axes of Tlingit navigation rather than some absolute or uniform scheme of reckoning such as the cardinal directions or the calendar (Thornton 1997b).2 Similarly, relationships and possessory rights over lands were articulated and modified on the basis of path and project. Thus, in reflecting on the ownership of Taiya Inlet, another Goldschmidt and Haas witness, Haines elder Paddy Goenette, qualifies his group’s (the Chilkoot Kaagwaantaan clan’s) initial claim to the whole territory on a detailed consideration of the specific locales for production and the paths and projects of other clans (especially the Lukaax.ádi, which he is a child of ) throughout this area: I was born at the village of Chilkoot, and am a member of the Kaagwaantaan clan. . . .

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Dyea and Skagway are claimed by my people. There are three streams at Dyea, and there are three smokehouses there. The people did not live there the year around, but used the place a great deal. All three of these smokehouses were owned by Lukaax.ádi people. They controlled a large area of land. This place was used for berries as well as for smoking fish. The Indian people also hunted there and smoked meat. They generally went up there in the fall of the year. Some of the people would go up to pick berries and then rush back to Chilkoot to put them up. During the hunting season, however, they stayed up there a long time. We used to get seals at Skagway when I was a boy. I remember one man who lived there the year around, because things were easy to get. This man was related to my father. We would hunt seals in the fall. He hunted up the Skagway River. There was a big smokehouse on an island up the Skagway River where a stream comes in from the southeast. This place was called X’wat’héeni [Trout Stream]. This was a good place to get mountain goats. The Skagway area belongs to the Kaagwaantaan clan. (Goldschmidt and Haas 1998:108)

Again the narrative follows the seasonal flow of activity, moving in this case from summer to fall. Also evident is a distinction between harvest and processing locales for some resources during this era (i.e., the first half of the twentieth century). Thus, rather than bring jarring supplies to the seasonal camp, people instead “rush back to Chilkoot to put them up.” During hunting season, however, this is not a practical means for processing meat, and so they dry it out on the hunting grounds and, consequently, stay out “a long time.” One also finds that some people prefer certain harvest locales because resources are “easy to get,” a phrase that is often heard even today and reflects not merely resource abundance but also accessibility, harvestability, local knowledge, and the psychological comfort and security that comes with harvesting in places one knows and to which one belongs through social and historical ties. At the same time, other locales, such as those for seal hunting, have changed since Mr. Goenette’s childhood; though easy to get at one time, seals are no longer taken in quantity at Skagway, perhaps because it is too far to go (i.e., not worth the cost in time and resources), too developed, or other foods like mountain goat can no longer be taken easily there along with seal.

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The above statement is remarkably similar to another one made by a witness in Saxman, Charles T. Johnson, who also classifies ownership according to productive locales—again three fish streams. Burroughs Bay belongs to the Joonax (Unuk) Teikweidí. There are three streams up there, the Joonax (Unuk), Shaax Tá [Grant Creek], and Sháa Héeni. [Klehini River]. The Unuk is the biggest one. We had two houses up there where we got hooligans [eulachon] and dried them and made hooligan oil. Henry Denny also had a house there, and so did Frank Howard. My father’s brother had a smokehouse at the mouth of the Shaax Tá River. Now whites are taking up homesteads in that area. We also gather crabapples up there and just recently a homesteader has taken over the place where we got crabapples. In the fall, we used to dry bear and goat meat, smoke fish, pick cranberries (highbush) and crabapples. We go to this area about March 28 every spring to get hooligans. I went there year before last but this year I didn’t feel well enough. Joe Williams went up there. Denny had a smokehouse on Grant Creek [Shaax Tá]. Whites kept him out. One of the men had a rifle and was standing in the doorway when Denny came there. His wife got scared and they left and never returned. Fitzgibbon Cove (Shaaya Geeyí) was a place where we used to get hemlock bark in the spring. Joe Johnson’s father had a cabin there and he would go there before fish were available in the spring. There is a small creek on the north shore of Behm Narrows, just where Behm Canal comes in where the people could get early dog salmon and kings. This also belonged to Joe Johnson’s father. He was a Teikweidí. (165)

Here again, the witness follows the seasonal flow of productive resources, duly noting the interruptions in the cycle caused by competition from whites. Harvest sites for the first fish of the season, whether herring in Mr. Kitka’s case or hooligan or early dog and king salmon in Mr. Johnson’s case, hold a special significance in Tlingit environmental consciousness and sense of place. Similarly, late salmon runs also were highlighted in the geography of production because they extended the harvesting activity with the highest material payoff well into the fall. Especially important were fall dog salmon. Mr. Kitka regularly obtained these at Deep Bay through October, in a fishery that he and his father created in the mid-twenti130 Production and Place

eth century by transplanting and fertilizing fall dog salmon eggs from a stream at Excursion Inlet (see Thornton 1997b), an ingenious act of indigenous aquaculture. Other fall salmon locales were similarly celebrated, such as a small creek north of Lemon Creek in Juneau, called Eix’gulhéen, known as “a very good stream, especially for a late run of dog salmon, but also for cohos” (Goldschmidt and Haas 1998:113). Security Bay (Kúchx’w), near Kake, is also famous as a place where “they get dog salmon late in the fall” (176). While dog and coho salmon were valued fall resources, sockeye, the most durable of the Pacific salmon upon reaching freshwater, could in some cases be harvested into the winter. Chilkat elder Susie Nasook (102) remarked on one particularly long-producing stream, the Tsekhini [Tsikhéeni ], as “a place where fish were easy to get, and we have fished there from old times to the present day for sockeyes and cohos. We can get fish there until New Year.” In the ethnographic literature of the Northwest Coast, the winter months are often characterized as sedentary because the weather is poor and resources are scarce. Winter is highlighted as a time for ceremonies, storytelling, and household chores rather than wayfaring subsistence production. As the above examples illustrate, however, this is not strictly the case, either traditionally or in the postcontact era. While travel is often more limited in winter, food production does not cease. As Mr. Kitka’s narrative indicates, though the salmon may be gone, fishing for bottom fish such as halibut, flounder, and rockfish continued, as did localized shellfish (especially crab, clam, and cockle) gathering. Oberg (1973:67) also notes that shellfish were gathered, preserved, and stored from October through June. Recently, Madonna Moss (1993) has suggested, based on archeological and ethnographic evidence, that shellfish, while not highly prized, were an important dietary staple, especially among certain segments of society, such as women and those of low rank. Winter village life became decidedly less sedentary with the advent of fur trapping in the postcontact era. The winter months were when furbearers were considered prime, and trapping thus became an intensive winter project. To obtain furs, trappers, mainly young to middleaged males, created new paths—traplines—which they followed throughout the winter months. As Oberg points out, the intensification Production and Place 131

of the fur trade encouraged Tlingits to pursue terrestrial furbearers and to stake out individual trapping territories. In terms of individual paths and projects, this change in the relations of production meant that a “group formerly collective in its principal economic enterprises [became] individualistic in productions accompanied by the parceling out of original undivided territory” (Oberg 1973:60–61), though it was often a territory to which the Native could claim some aboriginal right through kinship. This transformation came at the expense of the house group, which previously had been the central unit of production. The intensification of trapping also meant that men were on the move throughout the winter, reversing the tide of sedentism and consolidation associated with modernization. In some cases new habitation sites were constructed to facilitate the production of furs. A family from Klukwan, for example, might move fifty miles south to Endicott River to trap for “mink, lynx and other animals” (Goldschmidt and Haas 1998:110), building a cabin there as a base. Walter Goldschmidt observed that, “where trapping does not require the establishment of permanent camps, the older ownership pattern is often overlooked” but that “Natives never trap an area specifically claimed by a living descendant of the original clan owning an area. There is considerable resentment among the Natives of the fact that white trappers do not respect such ownership rights” (24). In addition to trapping, tending gardens, especially potato crops, rapidly became a part of the seasonal flow of the postcontact economy. Tlingit cultivation of plants was not new; berry patches and perhaps other plant resources had been actively managed prior to contact (Thornton 1999b). Nor did Natives give up fishing for farming, as “civilizing” agents might have hoped. Instead, gardens, whether located near fish camps or elsewhere, simply became another station on the path of production. Billy Jones’s testimony regarding his relationship with Kelp Bay reflects this integration: “In the old days we went to Kelp Bay in March and would stay there all summer and smoke fish and gather food for winter use. About fall we would come back to Angoon and harvest our potatoes” (Goldschmidt and Haas 1998:71). Seasonal paths of production were instrumental not only to making a living but to the very definition of what constituted places and their reckoning in time, space, and memory. In discussing objective claims 132 Production and Place

to the lands and waters of Southeast Alaska in 1946, Tlingits consistently situated places within the spatiotemporal context of material production. Thus, people did not just own places or use them; rather, they lived in them and off them and through them in particular ensemblages of paths and projects that, collectively, defined the seasonal round and, to a large extent, the places themselves.

the social organization of production Along with the seasonal distribution and availability of resources, social organization has played a vital role in shaping how Tlingits make their living. Traditionally, various productive tasks took place in particular social organizational contexts that were flexibly suited to carrying them out. As Wayne Suttles (1968, 1974) and, more recently, Allan Richardson (1982) have pointed out, the considerable variations in social organization of production on the Northwest Coast are at least partly attributable to environmental variations. Generally, as one moves north along the coast there are fewer types of resources, and more seasonal and local variation, but perhaps less year-to-year fluctuation among them. In Southeast Alaska, the northern fringe of the culture area, resources tend to be much more concentrated in time and space than in northern California, the southern fringe. These conditions posed special problems for the organization of labor in the north. When salmon runs are concentrated in dispersed streams over periods of weeks rather than months as in the south, it is important to be able to command a significant labor force to harvest and process that resource while it is available. The northern matrilineal system of labor organization and land tenure, including exclusive control of productive patches of resources—among the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian—can be viewed as a response to this spatiotemporal concentration of resources. For Tlingits, localized segments of the matrilineages, clans and house groups, provided the corporate means, along with slavery (see Donald 1997), to harvest enough resources to support large populations relative to other hunter-gatherers. Thus Richardson (1982:105) found, “The most noteworthy aspects of resource control on the Northwest Coast are the general gradient of increasing resource control from south to north (with a peak in the extreme north Production and Place 133

[i.e., Tlingit country]), and the gradient, also from south to north, of increasing emphasis on descent-based kin groups.” Kinship, then, was central to production. In Tlingit country, almost all production took place in the context of lands and sites that were owned, defended, and inherited through these clans and house groups. As shown, this social geography was intimately bound up not only with concepts of place but also with individual and social group identity. Kinship, and particularly clan organization, shaped the core and peripheral contours of an individual’s geographic knowledge. Similarly, kinship provided a specific framework for the teaching of geography, through material and symbolic production, and therefore a resonant context for the remembrance of place. For this reason Tlingit discussions of place are nearly inseparable from discussions of family. Hence, Herman Kitka consistently references his uncles when referring to his knowledge of Deep Bay and other productive sites around Sitka. Kinship structured not only how one came to know places but how one talked about them as well. Proper ancestral links were a prerequisite for speaking authoritatively on place. These ties symbolized a social group’s continuity on a particular landscape as well as the group’s relationship to the land. In Tlingit law, the basis for ownership of specific territories was always deeply rooted in history. History, embodied in stories and other expressive cultural forms, recorded how people came to own places. Tlingits considered representations of place history, such as blankets, hats, and regalia, as at.óow (sacred possessions), forming a kind of deed of trust or title to the sites they referenced. This is why, in his testimony on possessory rights of his clan, Angoon elder Billy Jones felt compelled to state, “I could tell long stories about each of these places and about how our people came to own them, but that would take very much time, so I am just telling who owns them now” (Goldschmidt and Haas 1998:150). Jones clearly did not prefer the shorthand approach, for it was tantamount to reading the signatures on the deed (the names of those who now own the property) without bothering to conduct a “title search” or examine the historical record itself (the story of how the owners came to possess the property). Moreover, for Tlingits at least, the invocation of ancestral names served to summon forth that record of ownership and title and make it tangible, personal, and continuous—in short, legitimate. By that same logic, Jones 134 Production and Place

challenged the legitimacy of the U.S. government’s claims to the land, asking rhetorically, “Can any government official name his grandfather or grandfathers that have occupied any of our land, like we can? This land is our[s] and we shall fight for it!” (1948 affidavit in Curry and Weissbrodt n.d.) Similarly, Herman Kitka’s father, Frank, challenged the U.S. government’s rights to possess his beloved Deep Bay, asking a Forest Service official, “Which one of your grandfathers put a claim on this land?” For these men, white claims to property were not legitimate without a bona fide ancestral history, a kinship link, shagóon. Reciting clan histories and invoking the names of deceased relatives were two important ways that ancestral knowledge was invoked in support of claims to productive sites and other valued places. It is still common today for an authoritative statement about the history of a place to be bolstered by the phrase “I know this because I heard it from my uncle” or “my grandfather” or “my auntie” or, simply, “by those now dead who came before us.” If the relative or ancestors are respected, such invocations carry great weight in the court of public opinion and are analogous to producing sworn testimony, if not incontrovertible material evidence, in support of a case in a modern American court. The words of Billy Jones are again illustrative, though in this case he (a Deisheetaan) is testifying on behalf of another clan (the Dakl’aweidí). Eliza Harbor is called Gúnx and belongs to the Dakl’awedí clan. When they left Stikine River they first went to Eliza Harbor and established a village at Loon Point. Later they found this place unsatisfactory and moved to Angoon. I heard all this from the old people and have seen the remains of houses. I also have seen one smokehouse on Liesno Island, which the native people call Teey X’áat’i. A man named T|ese’ic from Angoon, who now lives at Tyee, claims that place. He belongs to the Dakl’awedí i clan. He goes there to hunt and trap and he lets other Native people trap there. (Goldschmidt and Haas 1998:150; emphasis added)

Even though, in the context of the land claim investigation, he does not feel he has time to “tell the stories,” Jones still manages to encapsulate the entire migratory history of the clan in a few short sentences. Moreover, he combines this ancestral knowledge with firsthand experience and personal knowledge of current conditions of production, ownerProduction and Place 135

ship, and access as if it was a natural fulfillment of heritage and destiny, or shagóon.

respect, reciprocity, and the act of permission Although Tlingits exercised a high degree of territorial control over key production sites, access, even to non-matrikin, was typically extended if permission was sought. The great Tlingit attorney William Paul (n.d.) stressed, “In . . . olden days, the boundary lines demarking the areas claimed by adjoining tribes [or clans] were by consensus and were protected by respect.” Yet, the boundaries were permeable. “According to the unwritten Tlingit law it was incumbent upon everyone belonging to a phratry [e.g., Raven or Eagle/Wolf ] to house and feed any other members who should visit him, no matter from how great a distance he might come” (Swanton 1908:427). But non-matrikin were expected to show respect by seeking formal permission from the host group before penetrating their territory. As with title to property, permission of access was sought and granted through the idiom of kinship. This procedure, in effect, validated the host’s claim to the site by recognizing his ancestral ties to the place. To ask permission was to explicitly recognize and respect the host’s natural rights to the land. Thus, the communicative act of obtaining permission served as a symbolic reinforcement and maintenance of social boundaries while at the same time allowing for permeation of those boundaries to meet material needs and engender reciprocal ties. Anthropologist Ronald L. Olson (1967:vi), who was adopted by the Chilkat Gaanaxteidí of the Raven moiety, explains how this principle might be put into practice upon entering an “alien” village. In 1934 I was in the village of Klawak when the coastwise maritime strike stopped all communications with the outside world. Food supplies ran short and we had to depend almost wholly on salmon. Since the local area, including the salmon stream, was property of the Ganaxadi [Gaanax.adi] (the equivalent of the Chilkat Ganaxtedih [Gaanaxteidí]) I had the necessary right to harpoon salmon there. I was also able to borrow a harpoon from a Tlowahaddih [Lkuweidí?] man who was, of course, my “brother-in-law.” If he refused it would have shown how little he respected my wife who was automatically 136 Production and Place

a Kagwantan [Kaagwaantaan] Wolf and his “sister.” Seeing his lack of respect for her, I might have divorced her, causing her clan to lose face. This is the Tlingit attitude. He could not refuse the loan so long as he had the harpoon which he was not using at the time. Had I been counted as a Wolf I could then have gone to a “brother-in-law” Ganaxadi and asked his permission to spear salmon in his stream. For a like reason he could not have refused. All in all, the rivalry between the moieties is largely ceremonial in nature. The reciprocal rights and obligations are and were operative to a far greater degree.

By asking permission and emphasizing proper kinship ties, an individual could under most circumstances obtain temporary use rights to virtually any territory in Tlingit land. In fact, one’s extensive network of rights was perhaps limited only by one’s own creativity, knowledge of the social structure (what I have termed tsk, or traditional social knowledge), and ability to navigate the social space between host and visitor. Perhaps the only exception was during times of resource stress or vulnerability, when conservation became paramount, but even then guests might still be accommodated through other means of sharing. Unfortunately, as Olson suggests, this dynamic aspect of land use and territoriality has often been overlooked in discussions of property and resource tenure, especially among groups that rely on hunting, fishing, and gathering (cf. Myers 1982; Williams and Hunn 1982; Carrier 1987; Berkes 1998; Thornton 1999b). Failure to seek permission could bring censure, or the trespasser might be “educated” in a more polite way. For instance, “If a man was camped at a creek claimed by his clan and household and a man of the opposite moiety came there, the visitor was not openly told of the ownership, he was invited in, feasted, and told how the host’s ancestors always came there to fish. A small gift was made to the visitor. This was, in effect, telling him the creek was claimed” (Olson 1967:12). The problem of “freeloaders” was similarly handled by a culturally sanctioned means of censure, or even violence. Those who abused their privileges by staying too long, or taking too much, or violating some local ordinance, were “called by a special term of contempt, (n)icka-qa’wu [nichkakáawu]” (Swanton 1908:427), or “person of the beach.” This term stands in opposition to the Tlingit cultural ideal of the aankáawu, or “person of the village,” a term reserved for the aristocracy. By contrast, Production and Place 137

the nichkakáawu was an outcast—marginal and uncivilized, without home, property, country, or legitimate social relations (cf. Olson 1967:vi; Kan 1989), in short, displaced. This moral framework was extended to interactions with nonhuman relatives, such as bears, whose permission might be sought to harvest salmon or berries in dense patches used by both groups. Such a request was made by the late Amy Marvin, clan mother of the Huna Chookaneidí, upon landing on the shores of Dundas Bay to pick nagoonberries in August of 1996. Because the brown bear is a totemic ancestor of her clan, she addresses the bears as “my mother’s grandfathers,” a particularly respectful approbation. Have pity on us my mother’s grandfathers. We are moving about here searching for our food. Our numbers are growing small. Have pity on us and allow us through. Have pity on us. Let it be as though you have poured good luck into our path. Wherever we should go Move away from our path. Have pity on us [literally, We are in a pitiful state]. Please hear our voices. My mother’s grandfathers Have pity on all of us. (A Time of Gathering 1999; translated from the Tlingit by John Marks)

On this occasion the bears abided and left the group alone. If not, they may have risked becoming outcasts themselves. Like nichkakáawu, bears could be ostracized by their own kind for violating prescribed, respectful norms of interaction with humans (Thornton n.d.). 138 Production and Place

The practice of asking permission continued to be exercised regularly throughout the early twentieth century and in some places continues to be observed to this day. According to Sitka Native George Lewis, whose family had possessory rights of Goddard Hot Springs near Sitka, this courtesy also was regularly followed by the Russians, who, he said, “never used these hot springs without first getting permission from the owner and bringing gifts of food, blankets, or clothing” (Goldschmidt and Haas 1998:64–65). Despite a long tenure under American common property law, in 1946 Tlingits were still respecting clan boundaries by seeking permission from the local hít s’áati (house-group leader) or clan leader to use foreign hunting and trapping areas. With approval, a member of a Wrangell clan recalled, “Last winter some of the Tlingit people came up from Saxman and were good enough to ask our people permission to trap there and to find out if any of us were going down before they went to use the area” (76). It seems that this sanction was operable for subsistence activities, particularly hunting and trapping, though not for commercial fishing, which came to be viewed in a different light. Among more traditional Tlingits, this courtesy is still extended as a sign of respect to the recognized steward of a place when hunting, fishing, or overnighting there. As Herman Kitka, a Kaagwaantaan leader and child of the L’uknax.ádi clan centered at Deep Bay, told me: “A lot of the people still ask my permission to use Deep Bay when they’re going up there to get their subsistence foods; I never say no. ‘I don’t own it,’ I tell them, ‘I’m just taking care of it.’” This typifies the Tlingit attitude toward conservation: it is a matter not so much of “resource management” as of “taking care” of places.

local knowledge (tek), conservation, and taking care of places Conserving or taking care of places requires intimate local knowledge of their natural and social history. Local knowledge, also called traditional ecological knowledge (tek) or indigenous (environmental) knowledge (ik) (cf. Hunn 1993; Berkes 1998; Ellen, Parkes, and Bicker 2000; Bicker, Sillitoe, and Pottier 2004), of place is a primary, though not always sufficient, impetus for conservation (Krech 1999; Hunn et al. Production and Place 139

2003). However, without intimate local knowledge of an ecosystem, and a desire to “take care of it,” conservation might be impossible, even if there is effective control over access and demand of natural resources. In this light, the restriction and permitting of access and use to selected resource sites should be seen not simply as a matter of territoriality but also as an opportunity to seek local knowledge on how to properly interact with particular places from those who have dwelled there sustainably for generations. Even prior to contact, it is clear that Tlingits had the technologies and wherewithal to drastically alter the distribution and abundance of resources in localized areas. The prescription to seek local permission provided a means for local resource managers to counsel visitors on the best places and ways to harvest without compromising the resource. For example, in Yakutat Kwáan, Icy Bay and Yakutat Bay were two important marine hunting areas because of the high density and predictability of seals. But as de Laguna (1972, 1:374) discovered, access to these areas was strictly controlled not only because of these factors but because these bays were sensitive breeding places. As one expert told her: “If there are young seals, then the mothers will stay with them, and there is not as much chance of scaring the whole herd away. . . . The chief [hít s’áatí, or house leader] would also say that the men had to get seals with spears. He didn’t want people to shoot [with guns] because they would scare the seals. If anybody went sealing before the seal had pups, they would scare the whole herd away.” Tlingits realized the need to prevent seals from dispersing and possibly relocating prior to pupping and placed social and technological controls on hunters to prevent the seals from being disturbed. In another case at Wrangell, hunting was allowed on a certain island but camping was prohibited, “so as not to chase off the game” (Goldschmidt and Haas 1998:76). Local knowledge and behavioral sanctions also applied to dealings with the supernatural elements of particular sites. Local owners developed such prescriptions and proscriptions (ligaas’, or taboos; literally “against nature”) on the basis of collective experience and the desire to ensure a sustainable supply of resources. If guests ignored them or otherwise threatened the resource, they were subject to punishment, as was the case preceding a nineteenth-century massacre of Aleuts by local Tlingits at Kayak Island in northern Tlingit country; having been extended the privilege of harvesting seals in the strait east of the island, the Aleuts 140 Production and Place

were said to have taken too many, thereby provoking reprisals from the Tlingit. Generations’ following the same seasonal paths and projects led to a wealth of accumulated knowledge and an intimacy with place through the communion of food production. This communion was manifest not only in one’s adaptation to the contingencies of a particular environment but also in the profound sense of familiarity, comfort, integration, and security that came with knowing how to live off the land. This meant understanding the rhythm and flow of a place, along with its resources. In this context, production, which might ordinarily be thought of as work, came to be viewed as natural, enjoyable, and even easy. Seagull Creek near Hoonah was “an easy place to get fish” (Goldschmidt and Haas 1998:59), and nearby Neka Bay a place where “it was easy to get high bush cranberries, blueberries, salmon berries and loganberries” (59). Such statements illustrate how a high degree of local environmental knowledge facilitates production so as to reduce anxiety and create positive feelings of comfort, satisfaction, and integration with the environment—a strong and sustaining sense of being-in-place. Indeed, among the Tlingit it is common for topophilia to be expressed in the idiom of production, which, in turn, was always linked to kinship and ancestry. Reflecting on her relationship with Sitkoh Bay, the late Deisheetaan elder Mary Willis (fig. 4.2) put it this way: Oh, I used to like it there. Always fish there, summertime. Gaat Héeni they call it— Sitkoh Creek, by the cannery. Lots of sockeyes there. Oh I used to like it . . . It was easy for me to put up fish there. There’s a fish hole— Ísh they call it. We used to set the hooks there. Sometimes get two or three at once . . . Oh, I used to like that place . . . I used to like to stay over there.

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fig. 4.2. The late Mary Willis holds the Deisheetaan button blanket proclaiming her clan’s organic ties to Sitkoh Bay in central Southeast Alaska and referencing key landmarks, including Yéil Katóogu (Raven’s Cave), Gaat Héeni (Sockeye Creek), and Tinaa Gooni (Copper Shield Springwater). Photo by T. Thornton It was easy for me to put up food there. I fix the sockeye. We get halibut near the point. I fix it too . . . Every year we used to go there . . . My [maternal] uncle owned that place . . . All our foods were there for us. Oh, I used to like that place.

Perhaps this is why on her last trip to Sitkoh Bay in 1990, Mrs. Willis, then in her eighties, wanted first to see the sockeye in Gaat Héeni and, upon seeing them, exclaimed to our boat captain, “Where’s the net?” For Mary Willis, food production comprised the ebb and flow of life at Sitkoh Bay, and she vaulted from the skiff ready to fish. Other “good places” (cf. L. Johnson 2000) were similarly defined by their productive habitats and the foods they provided. Returning from our trip 142 Production and Place

she remembered Atahéen (Creek at the Head) at the head of Sitkoh Bay, which we had not had time to visit. She told me its Tlingit name and added, “[We] used to get the [wild] rice from there—kóox—and tl’aak’wách’ [Indian rhubarb—it’s] like a spinach, the leaves; we used to get it from there, the long leaves. Some day I’ll show you. . . . Kóox is good with blueberries too.” The land continued to speak to her all the way back to Angoon. And much of the remainder of her life was devoted to trying to conserve Sitkoh Bay as a Deisheetaan landscape and a good place to put up food.

technology and the experience of place Production and, by extension, Tlingits’ relationships to places were mediated by the technologies employed in making a living. Extensive local knowledge of the environment through tradition and practice was one such technology (Ridington 1990). The body itself was another. As outlined earlier, the body constrains our experience and communion with place by its very capacities and limitations. Our bodies can be engaged in only one place at a time, so we encounter places serially with some near and others far. “When we say that an object is huge or tiny, nearby or far away, it is often without any comparison, even implicit with any other object, or even with the size and objective position [i.e., the simple location] of our own body, but merely in relation to a certain ‘scope’ of our gestures, a certain ‘hold’ of the phenomenal body on its surroundings” (Merleau-Ponty 1962:266). The phenomenology of perception visà-vis the body-subject is emphasized in Tlingit travel narratives, such as the following story about a Kwáashk’i Kwáan (Yakutat Raven) group traveling along the Gulf Coast from Copper River toward Yakutat (note too the phenomenology of production): Then the people thought they saw a wolverine. They used it for a compass and walked towards it. When they came to it they saw it was a little mountain, an island with trees on it, just a little hill. . . . That night a wolverine came to the fire. The hungry people killed him and ate him. They cut him up in little pieces to feed all the people. Then they walked on again. Pretty soon they saw a rabbit sitting on the snow, far away. They walked

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fig. 4.3. Mount Saint Elias (Waas’eit’ashaa [Mountain Inland of Icy Bay]) is celebrated as a sentient being and crest in this Yakutat Kwáashk’i Kwáan tunic with blanket. A beacon for travelers, the mountain appeared in various guises to clan members during their migration to Yakutat from Copper River; its form was often determined by factors such as weather, the travelers’ orientation and distance, and other circumstances. Tlingit perceptions of the mountain’s indwelling spirit are reflected in the lower portion of the design. Sheldon Jackson Museum sj-i-a-329

towards the rabbit. After two days walking they saw it was the top of a mountain, but they kept on walking anyway. Finally they came to Mount Saint Elias. It was a compass for the people. (De Laguna 1972, 1:32)

In another story the peak of the same mountain is perceived by oceanvoyaging Tlingit mariners as a “seagull” above the clouds—“Every day it was getting higher”—before finally revealing itself as Mount Saint Elias (see fig. 4.3) when the distance between observers and object narrows. These perceptual phenomena are worth noting in oral tradition, for they remind the listener that things are not always what they seem, or, phrased in Tlingit metaphysics, landscape features, as beings, may take more than one form.3 Thus, in Tlingit cosmology, the morphological 144 Production and Place

changes of Mount Saint Elias are more than just optical illusions: they are navigational cues, portents of the future, transformations of sentient beings, signs to be read. Reading the mountain as a series of animal encounters emphasizes the phenomenal experience of travel, perception, subsistence, and interspecies encounters along the rugged Gulf Coast of Tlingit country. Like the human body, nonhuman forms are truly metaphors to live by. Tlingit language is also attentive to this phenomenon of perceptual change according to relational distance. For instance, there are the following terms: hé, indicating an object that is very near and always present; yaat, denoting an object that is a bit farther off but still in one’s “scope,” to use Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s term; yut, indicating something so remote that it can be used as an impersonal article; wé, suggesting an object so far away that it is almost invisible or barely in one’s perceptual “hold”; and, finally, wuyík, relating to something that is beyond all perceptual recognition.4 The relational efficacy of such finegrained distinctions for a maritime hunting-gathering people can hardly be overestimated. Indeed, this may be true for all indigenous, oral cultures, for whom places are never just passive settings. Remember that in oral cultures the human eyes and ears have not yet shifted their synaesthetic participation from the animate surroundings to the written word. Particular mountains, canyons, streams, boulder-strewn fields, or groves of trees have not yet lost the expressive potency and dynamism with which they spontaneously present themselves to the senses. A particular place in the land is never, for an oral culture, just a passive or inert setting for the human events that occur there. It is an active participant in those occurrences. Indeed, by virtue of its underlying and enveloping presence, the place may even be felt to be the source, the primary power that expresses itself through the various events that unfold there. (Abram 1996:162)

The technology of the body and its influence on phenomenal experience is particularly evident in descriptions of production. Place memories are often memories of the paths taken to various hunting, fishing, or gathering sites. Mary Williams’s 1946 recollections of the Tsirku River (Goldschmidt and Haas 1998:30) are illustrative: Production and Place 145

At the Takhin Glacier in the upper portion of the Tsirku River two days by canoe there was a berrying place called Dakhéen Xuká. This could also be reached by way of the Takhin River, and the Haines people sometimes came up this way. This place belonged to the Kaagwaantaan clan. We gathered mountain blueberries and other berries there. Helen Hotch went up there with her father when she was a girl of less than ten (about 40 years ago). Our people haven’t gone up there recently because it is too hard to get to by canoe . . . The next place down the Tsirku River is called Qatxalqiya [Katgalgiyá?], between the confluence of Summit Creek and of Nugget Creek with the Tsirku. Berries and gophers were obtained from both sides of the Tsirku here. The Kaagwaantaan were recognized as owners but others went there. I only went there one time about 30 years ago. Mr. and Mrs. Kudeinahaa went up there frequently before his death about 15 years ago. Don’t know of anyone going up there recently. At a place on the Tsirku River where two cliffs come together is a place called Gil’ X’aak, which was used as a camping place and where a berry called tínx (bearberry), soapberries and blueberries were obtained. This was also a good place for mountain goats. It belonged to the whole Klukwan people.

Despite a thirty-year absence from this place, Mrs. Williams still recalls the details of the landscape in vivid detail, as if she were actually traveling up that river (two days by canoe) with her audience, reading the navigational cues (e.g., “where two cliffs come together”) in sequence, and stopping at camps or productive sites to obtain foods (mountain blueberries here or soapberries there). The geography is remembered from an embodied perspective as it was experienced in subsistence or other productive ventures launched from the downriver settlement at Klukwan. Geographer David Seamon refers to such time-space routines as “body ballets” (a more aesthetically pleasing term than “routines”), which he defines as a “set of integrated behaviors which sustain a particular task or aim” (1980:157). Following Merleau-Ponty, Seamon argues that the body is more than a technology, that it can become a kind of “precognitive” subject that by its very limits and capacities shapes behavior in a “preconscious way” (155). It is not that the body supplants the mind as agent but rather that the body and mind exist in a dialectical rela146 Production and Place

tionship, each structuring and feeding back on the processes of the other, and, as the narratives above suggest, both contributing to the memory and definition of place. The discussion of the use of the body as a metaphor and cognitive tool for place naming in previous chapters illustrates another aspect of this dialectical relationship. Other technologies also had profound effects on the limits of production and the conceptualization of time, space, and place. The canoe, for example, as a means of negotiating the land and seascape was integral to people’s understanding of place. Already identified as a genre of place is the famous Yakutat gudiyé, the “secret” sealing canoes exquisitely designed for the tight maneuvering required to hunt the ice-choked waters of a particular place: Icy Bay. Canoes of various types were constructed to facilitate production, be it hunting, fishing, warfare, ocean or riverine travel, or trade. Mrs. Williams’s two-day journey to the Tsirku by canoe would have been impossible without the benefit of such watercraft. But production was also limited by technology. Thus, Porcupine Creek off the Klehini River was remarkable not just as a subsistence site but because it was “the highest camp site to which the natives could get by canoe” (Goldschmidt and Haas 1998:31). The other important aspect of the relationship between traditional technologies and place was that tools and other manufactures were rendered from the local environment. Just as a place might be recognized and celebrated as a salmon fishing site, so too might a certain stand of timber be esteemed for its value in the production of canoes, paddles, houses, forts, temporary bark shelters, pitch, rope, baskets, adze handles, ladles, dishes, drums, bows, arrows, spear shafts, halibut hooks, and so forth. Thus, Emma Henry, a Klawock elder, remembered Sandy Point, east of Karta Bay, as “a very important place when I was a small girl” because her family camped there and, lacking “regular houses,” had to fashion shelters out of bark (Goldschmidt and Haas 1998:87). The act of constructing dwellings from local materials became a signature means of cultivating the landscape and making it part of their being. Like food production, technological production was a means of sustaining life through a communion with place. Moreover, signatures of inhabitation could be read in such places as “figures in the landscape” (Bierwert 1999:36) through the culturally modified trees and other subtle tracks of the ancestors. As Angoon elder Billy Jones reads Kelp Bay: Production and Place 147

“It is still possible to see the places in that area where the Native people gathered the bark off the yellow cedar trees, which they used for shelter” (Goldschmidt and Haas 1998:149). With some technologies, such as the traditional halibut hook, there was even more to it than this. Early explorers marveled at the efficiency of Tlingit-style halibut hooks and Tlingits also favored them for their selectivity: different sized hooks could be shaped (through carving) and influenced (through magic, or héixwa) to target appropriate-sized halibut (preferably not too small or too large). Originally fashioned from local materials, including spruce (or yellow cedar), alder (or yew in the south), spruce root, and bone (or later iron for the barb), the hooks themselves were considered sentient beings, possessing shaman-like powers (see Jonaitis 1981), and each hook was decorated and named: The decorations on the hook are to influence the fish and so face downward. They also give the hook a kind of life, as does the individual hook’s personal name. The fisherman would warm his hands in the sunshine and put them on his rig, and address the buoy, the line, and especially the hooks, telling the latter, “Go down to halibut land and fight!” Or he would tell them to go for the halibut’s wife so that the husband would become angry and bite the hook (using a ruse similar to that employed by Raven when he made the king salmon so angry at the greenstone that the fish jumped ashore). And the hook answers the fisherman. (De Laguna in Emmons 1991:117)

To produce such a technology was to give birth to a social creature. Houses, canoes, and other technologies were similarly conceived. Accordingly, the rendering of natural products into technologies was analogous to the process of human reproduction itself and, as such, was traditionally considered a natural part of the seasonal and life cycles, and of the experience of place.

changes in production: encroachment and modernization Changes in production have been marked, especially since the 1880s when commercialization of the fisheries began in earnest. The encroachment 148 Production and Place

of non-Natives, conflicts between Tlingit and Euro-American kinship and property law, and the introduction of new technologies and regulations have combined to change the way people relate to places through the means of production. Although Tlingits resisted these changes actively and with some success, competition and the loss of access to traditional resources combined with the demands of making a living in a developing capitalist economy necessitated accommodation. Through perseverance and good fortune some Tlingit communities have been able to conserve portions of their traditional land and resource base and minimize the deleterious effects of industrial development. These communities, it seems, continue to enjoy the highest degree of communion with place through traditional and modern means of production. The history of Alaska, like other colonial settings, has been a story of increasing encroachment upon indigenous lands and resources by non-Natives. Of course there was significant intra- and interethnic fighting over territory prior to contact, but the postcontact incursions were much more intensive. They came in waves. The first wave was that of the fur traders. The most important competitive influence was that of the Russian-American Company, though the Hudson’s Bay Company and independent American traders also competed for furs in Southeast Alaska. It is generally acknowledged that, despite their claim to Alaska by right of discovery and conquest, the Russians’ penetration of Lingít Aaní, especially outside of their regional center at Sitka, was very limited. Though Russians dominated the mercantilist fur trade economy, their penetration into other sectors of the economy was minimal in part because of Tlingit resistance. Indeed, the Russians remained highly dependent on Tlingits for labor, foodstuffs, and other necessities throughout the colonial period. The employment of Aleuts and Kodiaks by the Russians and other Native groups by the British and Americans to harvest furs posed a direct threat to Tlingit sovereignty and to the supply of key animal resources, such as sea otters. Consequently, the fur trade was a source of many conflicts. Tlingits destroyed the Russian settlements at Sitka in 1802 and at Yakutat in 1805, sacked the British Hudson’s Bay Company outpost at Fort Selkirk in 1851, and periodically attacked Aleut and Kodiak hunters who violated Tlingit territorial sovereignty (Emmons 1991; J. R. Gibson 1992). Although the Russians recaptured Sitka in 1804, they were always wary of travel Production and Place 149

beyond the stockaded settlement. Clearly, “Russian control of the region was purely mythical” (Drucker 1958:41; see also Hinckley 1996). Sea otters and other furbearers notwithstanding, the Russians otherwise respected Native property rights, even in the vicinity of their stronghold at Sitka. I have already cited the example of Goddard Hot Springs near Sitka, where the Russians reportedly “never used these hot springs without first getting permission from the owner and bringing gifts.” The same practice was reported at nearby Redoubt Bay, where Russians “recognized the native ownership of this bay by giving the owner food and clothing. He was treated and dressed like a prince of the Russians” (Goldschmidt and Haas 1998:64). According to Stephen Langdon (1989:314), “One can conceptualize these Russian payments as rental or lease fees, as they apparently did not transfer ownership rights, a practice which Oberg (1973) indicated was proscribed in Tlingit society.” From the perspective of production and relationships with place, the salient feature of these “leasing” arrangements was that they preserved the integrity of Tlingit “communal property” and resource management for fish and species other than furbearers. This remained largely the case though the early part of the American era in Alaska, from 1867 to 1889, after which the federal government began active management of Southeast Alaska fisheries. The second wave of economic incursion came with the commercialization of the fisheries, which began in the 1870s. The effects of this movement have been well documented by Jefferson Moser (1899), Stephen Langdon (1977, 1989), and Robert Price (1990) and for the fishery at Sitkoh Bay by Thomas Thornton, Robert Schroeder, and Robert Bosworth (1990). By 1900 commercial fishing and fish processing had become big business in Alaska, and there were more than twenty canneries in Southeast Alaska alone (Moser 1899; Alaska Fisheries Board and Alaska Department of Fisheries 1949; Price 1990). Even in the early years the effects of single fishing and cannery operation could be widespread and devastating. For example, the Redoubt Bay cannery near Sitka, established in 1889, was within a year intensively exploiting fisheries more than fifty miles away at Sitkoh Bay. As Langdon (1989) has shown, the struggle during this period was between traditional communal property rights of Southeast Alaska Natives and the “common property” rights favored by the invading com150 Production and Place

mercial enterprises to maximize access. The latter, of course, prevailed under American law and, with the help of the U.S. military, was enforced against the Tlingits despite fierce resistance in many instances. The case of Sitkoh Bay (Thornton, Schroeder, and Bosworth 1990) illustrates how this transformation came about. When fishermen from the Redoubt cannery began penetrating Sitkoh Bay, local Tlingits expected them to ask for permission to fish. Failure to follow the traditional protocol led to a standoff with the Deisheetaan Tlingit owners, who had a sizable seasonal fishing settlement of over one hundred residents at Sitkoh Creek (Gaat Héeni, or Sockeye Creek, a prime fishery). According to Price (1990:120), this conflict marked the first instance of U.S. military force employed against a Native group on behalf of a cannery. The Alaskan, a Sitka newspaper, reported on July 12, 1890, that Indians were preventing non-Natives from fishing in Sitkoh Bay, “claiming exclusive rights to its open and navigable waters.” A week later, following the return of U.S. Marine Lt. Coontz, who was dispatched to adjudicate the situation, the Alaskan (July 19, 1890) offered this synopsis: It appears that the present Native claimants of the exclusive right to fish in that bay are the descendants of the former villagers who had their permanent abode there while the present generation lives now across Chatham Straits in the Kootznahoo settlement. . . . The Natives asked from every fisherman a royalty of 25 cents per day; which was not conceded. At last not being able to come to a mutual understanding in this imbroglio, the Lieut. proposed that the contesting Indians should proceed with him to Sitka in order to have the matter settled by the civil authorities. This proposition was readily accepted, and the Natives are now here awaiting the action of the civil government.

Lt. Coontz also recounted the incident in his autobiography, which provides additional details of the incident: When we reached our destination I found the white men in the upper part of the bay with their seines and everything ready to haul, and a band of one hundred and twenty-five Indians on a point of land where a little stream enters the bay. . . . We saw that they were all armed with shotguns, rifles and other implements of war. I picked out the leader whom I found to be

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Baptist Jim. . . . I demanded the surrender of the entire party at once. He demurred, but I told him that even if he did kill us, the federal government would sooner or later have its innings with them, and that if the Indians had real grievances, they could be adjusted by the governor [in Sitka]. . . . . . . We chose about twenty of the leaders . . . and at midnight hove up anchor and started for Sitka, leaving the families behind to come on later as best they could. . . . Their troubles dragged for months, and the governmental investigation took so long that the poor Indians, who stayed with their friends at the Ranch in Sitka, gradually became discouraged and one by one went home. As soon as the Indians surrendered I ordered the white men to start fishing, and I remember that on the first haul of the seine they took in more than a thousand salmon. (Coontz 1930:153–54)

Unable to forcibly resist or obtain legal recognition of their rights, the Deisheetaan risked losing their fishery altogether. In 1900, when a fish cannery was slated to be built at Sitkoh Bay below the Native village, the Deisheetaan owners contemplated further resistance, but chose to negotiate instead. According to Deisheetaan elder Mary Willis, an agreement was reached between the cannery operators and her uncles, the caretakers of the Sitkoh Creek: “They [the non-Native investors] asked them if they could put a cannery there. One of my uncles say ‘No, they’re going to take it [the territory] away from us!’ The other uncles say ‘We got lots of family. They always go to work to earn money . . . to Ketchikan . . . to Juneau, Petersburg. Over here, if they put the cannery here, the family gonna work here.’ Then he okayed it, [the] other uncle. They put it there” (Thornton, Schroeder, and Bosworth 1990:43). Local employment was a quid pro quo for Deisheetaan acceptance of the cannery in their territory. Local employment would enable the Deisheetaan to maintain their seasonal productive and residential ties to Sitkoh Bay in the changing economy. Few groups were so fortunate; most found themselves going to canneries in alien territories for the summer fishing season. In addition to an employment priority, the Sitkoh agreement also was said to have allowed for the Deisheetaan to retain ownership and control over their village and the bay. In fact, according to a recorded statement by Charlie Jim, Mary Willis’s deceased brother, who assumed

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leadership over the territory after the death of Sitkoh Bay Chief (a nephew of Baptist Jim): “He [Sitkoh Bay Chief ] also made clear that only the buildings would belong to the company, that the land would remain in the ownership of the [Deisheetaan] owners of the bay” (Alaska Consultants, Inc., 1976:27). In other words, the agreement was a lease arrangement rather than an outright sale or transfer of the territory. But in Sitkoh Bay, as elsewhere, such “leases” seem to have been made only out of expedience, to avoid initial confrontation, and “were abandoned as quickly as the cannery men could do so without endangering themselves” (Langdon 1989:317). In many cases, Tlingit property rights were not recognized at all. The fate of another sockeye stream at Klag Bay on Chichagof Island is representative: About forty-four years ago, we put up a sign at the mouth of a sockeye stream at Klag Bay saying that the place belonged to us and the others should keep out. Some Government officials and men from the Dundas Bay cannery said we had no right to keep others out. So we had to take the sign down, although the place belonged to us from way back, and this was our one sockeye stream that gave us all the sockeyes we needed. (Goldschmidt and Haas 1998:62)

As the federal government assumed full control of the territory, federal agents consistently enforced the principles of common property over communal property with respect to fisheries. As shown, however, Tlingits not only resisted this usurpation but continued to respect communal property rights among themselves. They also consistently pleaded their case to government officials (e.g., Moser 1899; U.S. Department of the Interior [1944]; Goldschmidt and Haas 1998). The following appeal, submitted on behalf of a Sitka group at the turn of the century was typical: We ask that Mr. Smith, the superintendent of the Baranof Packing Company, would be forbidden to take away our lagoons, bays and streams where we used to fish long before the arrival of white people. We wish that he would do the necessary fishing only with our consent. We demand that he stops throwing pieces of wood and tree trunks across the streams to prevent fish

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from going there to spawn. His fishing methods in the last eight years have made such places as Redoubt Bay, Cross Sound, Hoonah, Whale Bay, Necker Bay, and Redfish Bay virtually empty. (In Kan 1985:135)

The Tlingits’ concern was not only with property rights but also with the very survival of the fisheries, and by extension their own being. Moser (1899:43), who surveyed Alaska’s salmon fisheries on behalf of the government in 1897, heard these concerns repeatedly and recognized the impending consequences if something was not done. Whenever the “Albatross” anchored near any locality either permanently or temporarily inhabited by Natives, a delegation of the older men or chief came on board and requested an audience. The powwows which followed invariably took the form of relating the oppression of the white men. . . . These streams, under their own administration, for centuries have belonged to certain families or clans. . . . No Indians would fish in a stream not their own except by invitation, and they cannot understand how those of a higher civilization should be—as they regard it less honorable. . . . They claim the white man is crowding them from their houses, robbing them of their ancestral rights, taking away their fish by shiploads; that their streams must soon become exhausted; that the Indian will have no supply to maintain himself and family; and that starvation must follow. . . . . . . My own sympathy is with the Indians and I would gladly recommend, if the way were clear, the establishment of ownership in streams; but it is impracticable, and I can only ask . . . whatever law is framed, that a liberal balance be thrown in his favor.

Tlingits and Haidas realized that the principle of common property was in the end not only unjust but unsustainable, leading ultimately to a tragedy of the commons (Hardin 1968). Non-Native resource managers, however, did not come to this realization until the 1960s. Ironically, as Langdon points out, the state of Alaska eventually adopted a limitedentry permit system, which constituted a “reinstitution of property rights to the salmon fisheries” (1989:328). But limited-entry imposed restrictions only on participation (a finite number of transferable, individual permits) and not on place (save for closures).5 And this system has led to Native villagers’ further alienation from fishing rights. 154 Production and Place

Under common property rule, Natives continued to assert their traditional rights, but, lacking economic alternatives, they had no choice but to participate in commercial fishing. As the Sitkoh Bay case shows, the primary goal was to maintain ties to traditional fishing grounds through the commercial fisheries. However, in most cases competition and the intensive and selective (with regard to salmon species) nature of the industry made this impossible over the long term. The traditional place-bound economy was replaced by a regional and global one characterized by the “flexible accumulation” (Harvey 1989) of salmon wherever they could be harvested most efficiently with commercial gear. The effect of this economic change was to further restructure Southeast Alaska Natives’ productive relationships to places. In 1946, one Native fisherman with ties to Kegan Cove summed up the changes this way: “We never used to go anywhere else but fished only in this bay, but now I have to run all over with my gas boat to catch fish” (Goldschmidt and Haas 1998:84). The contradictions between the traditional and modern economies created crosscutting tensions among Natives participating in the commercial fishery. Like trapping, commercial fishing increasingly became an individual or nuclear family enterprise rather than one carried on by the clan or house group. To succeed, commercial fishermen were constantly “prospecting” for fish in areas outside of their traditional territories. Nonlocals might be confronted by local Tlingits regarding their uninvited presence, creating tense situations. Mark Jacobs Sr., a Deisheetaan Tlingit from Angoon and Sitka, who was able to mitigate such a situation in Klawock through good humor, related the following account: In 1918, I went fishing on a purse seine boat along with another fellow down to Klawock district, and when I entered the store I was talking with the storekeeper, and an old Indian asked me what I was. And I told him that I was Thlingit. And he asked me, “That is not the question I asked you. Do you belong to the Raven tribe or to the Eagle tribe?” And I told him that I did not know what he was talking about because I could not fly. That was my answer. And he laughed. And he says, “The people generally ask this question, and they don’t insult each other when they ask it.” So I told him, “I didn’t come down here to insult anybody. I came down here to make a liv-

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ing.” [“]Well,[”] he says, [“]that is fine.” And with that conversation he granted me the right to fish around Klawock district. (U.S. Department of the Interior [1944])

Another way to manage these contradictions intellectually was to distinguish between commercial fishing for market and fishing for one’s own use (i.e., subsistence). In the context of the land claims investigation by Goldschmidt and Haas in 1946, statements such as “I have fished up Dolomi when purse seining but never put up fish there for my own use” (1998:174; emphasis added) implicitly conveyed that the individual was not asserting a claim to an area, though he used it for commercial purposes. Such a distinction maintained the concept of a home fishery, at which one partook directly of the fruits of production, rather than indirectly through the wage economy.6 The third wave of encroachers was that of settlers, including homesteaders, miners, fox farmers, and others seeking to capitalize on Alaska’s land-based resources. Though their impacts were not as devastating in the short term as those of commercial fishing, in the long run they have proved most damaging to Tlingit place relations. The case of fox farms is illustrative and, like the commercial fishing situation, full of ironies. As with the fishing grounds, Natives’ communal rights to hunting grounds were usurped on the basis of the common property principle, only to be leased to non-Native fox farmers, who then exercised territorial prerogatives to exclude Natives as trespassers. In many cases these farm sites were traditional settlements or hunting and gathering places. For example, Chilkat elder Mildred Sparks reported in 1946 that “Battery Point [near Haines] was formerly an important source of tideland foods, especially seaweed” but that “a fox farm at this place now . . . prevents its being used” (Goldschmidt and Haas 1998:34). Fox farmers and homesteaders not only ran Natives off but also tore down their cabins and smokehouses. When two Huna Tlingits living on Drake Island in Glacier Bay were run off their land and their houses destroyed, members of the T’akdeintaan clan protested, but the farmer “told the people the government had given him permission” (55). Similarly, in Kelp Bay, a Native camp on Crow Island was taken over by a fox farmer: “The Natives tried to tell the farmer to leave the place, but he told them that the island belonged to the government” (71). This pattern was 156 Production and Place

repeated throughout Southeast Alaska by fox farmers, homesteaders, and miners (see Thornton 2004b), with the forces of the U.S. government aiding and abetting the process of usurpation of lands and the imposition of new property concepts. The overall effect of such competition on production was one of inhibition and fragmentation. Time after time Tlingits were prevented from engaging in communal production activities on their traditional lands and waters. Their paths and projects were disrupted in space and time by encroaching competitors, changing property conceptions, and increasing regulation of the commons. Moreover, with the penetration of intensive, extractive industries, the resource base itself became increasingly unstable, even after corrective measures, such as limited entry, were implemented. Thus, even where they were allowed to continue to hunt and fish untrammeled, Tlingits often found a dwindling or undependable resource supply. Given the centrality of salmon to Tlingit culture, changes in the salmon fisheries have been particularly disruptive. Today the state determines if, when, where, and how (e.g., gear type, proximity to stream, and targeted species) Alaskans fish, as well as how many fish they harvest. Assuming that one is eligible to participate in the commercial salmon fisheries, the fragmentation of these fisheries in time (openings as short as several hours), space (closed areas and other zoning), and participation (limited entry) precludes sustained productive interactions with place. Compare this to the traditional salmon harvest season, which involved two to six months of residence around spawning sites, or even to the pre-1960s commercial fishing era, which placed comparatively few restrictions on the paths and projects of fishermen and included seasonal employment and residence at canneries at least some of which— like Chatham in Sitkoh Bay—were located at or near traditional dwelling sites. The structure of the present commercial salmon fishing economy means that Tlingit fishermen spend many more hours in home ports than did their predecessors; consequently, their interactions with resources and productive sites tend to be shorter and often more intensive than in the past. Few can survive on fishing alone and must supplement their income with wage employment in other sectors of the economy. Such are the “changes in living,” alluded to by Herman Kitka, that have taken place over the past century. Production and Place 157

changes in social structure and property tenure .

U.S. legal concepts with regard to property rights and inheritance also had a dramatic impact on traditional communal production and relationships to place. Property rights and inheritance under U.S. law stood in direct opposition to traditional Tlingit concepts. As de Laguna (Emmons 1991:287) points out, The teachings of the white missionaries and the imposition of our legal system caused the greatest confusion, often with bloodshed and misery, when the old matrilineal rules of succession and inheritance were shifting to our patrilineal inheritance with widow’s rights to a share in her husband’s property. These difficulties were particularly disruptive when clan or lineage heirlooms were involved. Thus sons took the clan or lineage property that their fathers had held in trust and sold it as if it were private property; widows hold on to their husband’s regalia and were sometimes beaten by those who claimed it.

These conflicts also pervaded inheritance of productive lands. Instead of being transferred from mother (or mother’s brother) to son, land and stewardship rights were transmitted from father to son, in effect transferring the property to another moiety and clan. This often exacerbated tensions between clans and weakened the foundational tenets of traditional Tlingit law. The federal Allotment Act, extended to Alaska in 1906, served to further undermine the Tlingit communal system of land and resource tenure by subdividing and individualizing title to land. Beyond this, clan territories were further undermined by the shift in sociopolitical organization away from the kin-based clans to territorially based kwáans, shaped by the Indian Reorganization Act and isomorphic with modern statesanctioned villages (see Thornton 2002). In some cases communities moved to abandon clan territories altogether in favor of kwáan or village territories in which all members of the community were permitted to use an area in common without seeking any group’s permission for access. Changing property concepts also affected the social relations of production. Labor, traditionally recruited from the matrilineage, became much more of a nuclear family enterprise. Distribution also increasingly favored the nuclear family over the traditional clan or house group. 158 Production and Place

These changes in the relations of production tended to reinforce EuroAmerican concepts of property rights and inheritance. To acknowledge the changes wrought by alien economic, social, and regulatory structures is not to suggest, however, that traditional structuring relationships toward places have been destroyed. On the contrary, traditional socioeconomic structures continue to play a strong role in Tlingit relations of production as well as in their political discourse about place and production. Although, under present subsistence law, harvesting privileges are accorded to residents of geographically localized communities that meet the criteria established by state law, regardless of ethnicity, moiety, clan, or house ties, and other principles of social organization continue to be emphasized by many Tlingits as important criteria for evaluating subsistence and territorial rights. Thus, at Sitkoh Bay (Thornton, Schroeder, and Bosworth 1990) Angoon elders were found to emphasize not only that the sockeye fishery was part of Angoon Kwáan but that it was Deisheetaan clan territory, and furthermore that only one “side” of that clan (i.e., a particular house group) had legitimate possessory rights to the bay.7 Similarly, Sitka lineages with ties to the fishery continued to assert their claims. Many Tlingits express dissatisfaction over the fact that their relatives, who meet Tlingit social criteria for subsistence use of an area, are denied access rights by the state simply because they reside outside of Angoon. The late Mark Jacobs Jr., a Dakl’aweidí elder residing in Sitka but with ties to Angoon, put it this way: “My grandfather will not slap my hand if I reach into his bowl,” implying that kinship ties are just as important as residence. Mr. Jacobs’s metaphor reveals the durability not only of Native socioeconomic structures but of linguistic structures as well. Although the statement was made in English, the idiom of the (feast) bowl is clearly Tlingit. Just as people find meaning in two languages, so too do they reconcile participation in two economies: traditional subsistence and modern capitalism.

new technology and effects on path and project As in the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century (see Polanyi 1944), the catastrophic dislocation experienced by Southeast Alaska Production and Place 159

Natives in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was partly attributable to vast improvements in the tools of production. New technologies generally allowed for increased access to hunting, fishing, and gathering sites as well as for increased efficiency of harvest, though the situation was by no means that simple. Some of the traditional technologies of the Tlingit, such as stream-mouth lattice traps and weirs, were outlawed in 1889 because they were too efficient when applied competitively and without escapement (a practice Natives had traditionally followed). Under a common property regime it looked as if such technologies might have to be abandoned in favor of less efficient means; yet this was not the case. Witness the disastrously efficient but unselective floating fish traps, introduced in 1907. Langdon (1989) argues that the floating fish trap and gas-powered boat were the two technologies that most fundamentally altered traditional Tlingit relations of production. In the case of the gas-powered boats, the desire for young Tlingit men to strike out on their own in high-status jobs as independent fishing captains stimulated investment in motorized purse seine vessels. Though these boats constituted a considerable investment, cannery operators would finance the construction and purchase of the seiners on behalf of the fishermen; however, the debt incurred by the fishermen in effect indentured them to produce exclusively for the cannery. Some fishermen worked their whole lives without ever emerging from debt or gaining title to their boats. A major consequence of this dependence on the cannery, Langdon concludes, was withdrawal from the house group, although I would argue that this was not the most important outcome of this technology. In fact, in many cases the matrilineal labor structure of the house group was transferred to the seining crew, which in the early days typically required at least five or six men. Even today it is not uncommon to find maternal nephews crewing on their uncles’ seine boats; in this regard purse seiners have been much more preservative of the house group than, say, trollers or other boat technologies. Rather, the most important consequence of the gas-powered purse seine vessels was that they constrained fishermen to harvest more intensively and farther afield from their traditional production locales than ever before. In Southeast Alaska it was rarely possible to seine in one

160 Production and Place

place all summer and make enough money to keep up with the debt; one had to move from place to place targeting the most abundant and lucrative (in terms of market price) stocks in order to compete in this capital-intensive and spatially flexible economy. As shown, many fishermen, because of their knowledge and traditional ties to these places and also because of the social tensions inherent in moving into other clan and kwáan territories, lamented the fact that they had to abandon their traditional fisheries and “go all over” to fish. At the same time, the introduction of larger and faster boats did not always increase access. As one Taku Native noted, “I used to have a fish camp on Canyon Island and used it regularly until I got a larger boat with which I could not get up the river” (Goldschmidt and Haas 1998:42). Even where purse seiners could access traditional production sites, it meant exploiting them in a new way. And it was only after the adoption of larger gas-powered vessels that harvesters began to make a regular practice of sleeping on their boats rather than camping on land, which constituted yet another dislocation from traditional production locales and dwelling places. The issues with commercial fish traps were more clear-cut: “Floating fish traps were capital-intensive gear; owned by the canneries, they could be operated by one man, who would live on the trap. . . . The fish trap put tremendous strains on the Tlingit and Haida fishermen who had committed themselves wholeheartedly to the purse seine vessel. The floating trap not only supplanted fishermen through its sheer efficiency in harvesting great quantities, but also drove those that remained in purse-seining to the edge of economic disaster through low prices for fish” (Langdon 1989:321). Fish traps also jeopardized subsistence harvests at terminal fisheries, as salmon bound for those locations were intercepted by the traps before they could enter the bays and streams. Weak returns to the streams precluded traditional levels of production, and many groups stopped traveling to their remote camps altogether because it was no longer deemed worthwhile (e.g., Goldschmidt and Haas 1998:71, 77, 80, 81, 84, 101). In a 1947 letter to the Commission of Indian Affairs an Angoon Tlingit committee summed up the situation this way: “Cannery fish traps have greatly interfered with all Native fishing in all areas claimed under our possessory rights” (154).

Production and Place 161

Southeast Alaska Natives protested vigorously against fish traps and took legal and extralegal measures to stop them. Acts of sabotage, such as the following, were widely reported: “About forty years ago [ca. 1906] while the chief of the clan who claimed Redfish Bay was still alive, a cannery put a fish trap there. The chief ordered the trap set out loose, and since that time there never has been a trap on Redfish Bay. The Natives responsible for destroying the trap were threatened with imprisonment, but nothing ever happened to them” (65). Despite such acts of resistance, the effort to curtail the use of traps was achieved only after statehood in 1949. By this time the damage done to fisheries and to the traditional social groups that used them was in many cases irreparable. Changes in fishing production in many ways mirrored the transformation of place relations in commercial trapping. As Oberg (1973:60– 61) points out, “With the introduction of firearms, steel traps and the great demand for fur, a new orientation was given to Tlingit production”; as the fur trade intensified, “fur bearing animals began to lessen in number with the consequence that the formerly undivided clan territories began to be cut up into small sections.” Like the development of commercial fishing, this process severely weakened the house group as a productive unit controlling its own resource areas. Instead, the individual assumed more and more importance as a productive unit. In each case a change in property relationships led to changes in the relations of production, social and otherwise. The adoption of modern technologies not only increased extraction of resources and the individualizing of production; it also had the effect of alienating people from the process of technological production. Guns and steel traps were bought in stores and manufactured elsewhere, while bows and arrows, spears, and deadfalls had been manufactured locally and hence were part of traditional productive relationships with place. Rendering technologies from the environment was a fundamental part of the traditional seasonal round. The introduction of new technologies altered this element of production permanently. Those craftsmen and craftswomen who continue to produce traditional technologies with local materials, such as spruce root baskets or Chilkat blankets from local mountain goat wool, cedar bark, and natural dyes, are highly respected for maintaining such knowledge, skills, and ties to the land. 162 Production and Place

a current assessment As this discussion has demonstrated, production is a fundamental element of the experience of place. Over time Tlingit relationships to place have been altered by changes in the nature and level of production. But it is also important to recognize that the degree of change has varied considerably across communities and within communities to the level of the house group. Though a review of changes at the clan and house level is not possible here, production between communities can be compared. Variability in productive relations to traditional territories at the community level can be assessed in terms of three major factors: community integrity, environmental integrity, and subsistence production. Table 4.2 compares rural Southeast Alaska Native communities in terms of each of these factors. Community integrity may be defined as the degree to which the traditional composition of community, including its population and social organization, has been maintained. Because consistent figures on clan and house-group composition within communities are not available, population composition figures (percent Native, column 4) are used as a proxy for assessing community integrity. It is assumed that these populations represent to a significant degree the traditional clan and house groups that occupied the village. While such an assumption cannot be made for urban communities, where substantial portions of the Native population are immigrants from the villages, rural villages generally have not had large influxes of Natives from nonlocal kin groups. Thus, any rural community that is more than 75 percent Native is considered to have a high degree of integrity. Environmental integrity is more difficult to measure. A thorough analysis would evaluate all significant impacts to the physical environment of each kwáan, including natural and man-made changes. Obviously, those communities that have experienced less environmental degradation (such as Yakutat and Angoon) would be assumed to have higher production levels. I do not attempt such a complex assessment here. Rather, environmental integrity is evaluated here only on the basis of direct impacts on community location, undoubtedly a central dimension of the productive environment. Communities that have maintained Production and Place 163

Historic Territory

Kwáan

Xutsnoowú

Jilkoot

Xunaa

Kaigani

Kéex’

Present Village

Rural Native Community

Angoon

Haines

Hoonah

Hydaburg

Kake Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

73 (5)

89 (